I’ve finally got my act together. I’ve sulked long enough, and I think I figured out a solution. I think I can make this sweater work. I’ll live to knit another day.
But first, I had to rip an entire sleeve. It was… an unfortunate amount of ripping. I poured myself a nice stiff drink and went to town.
God… look how different that yarn is. (New yarn is on the right, old, scraggly yarn is on the left.)
I remembered someone telling me, or maybe reading somewhere (not sure where… I just know I didn’t make this up), that if you had two different dye lots that you had to make work, you can work them in stripes to blend the two colors together. It was worth a shot.
First I tried 2-row stripes, but that ended up looking really stripey. (I didn’t even bother taking a picture of this one- it didn’t look good.)
But, when I tried narrow, 1-row stripes, I managed to get a pretty even color. And, since I’m using a big circular needle, I can slide the needle back and forth after every other row. That means I don’t have to break my yarn or juggle extra balls of yarn! Winning!
See? The sleeve (the bottom portion of the picture) is pretty close to the rest of the sweater. It’s still a smidge blue-ish in real life, but only so much that someone looking really closely would notice it.
The only problem is that the combination of new yarn and old, frogged yarn makes the fabric a bit of a mess.
But at this point, I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope that it looks OK after blocking.
Have you ever had to get creative to get around poor dye-lot matching?
On the Needles 
I think once you block it and the yarn relaxes, the difference between the older and newer yarn will be less apparent.
Good job, btw!
I just had to frog an entire sweater to re-knit (the pleasure was mine, groan). I had a lot of success of winding the unraveled yarn into hanks, soaking it in cool water with Woolite for about 10 minutes, and letting it dry, straight and as unrumpled as new. It makes a world of difference before blocking, but I can’t say if the blocking would similarly take care of the problem. I’m inclined to say no because you use more yarn when it is bumpy and might even change your gauge a little, which is hard to completely fix from blocking alone. Good luck! It’s fun to see your progress with this project.
Same problem, but I bought the yarn all together. Unless you looked closely you couldn’t tell the yarn was different. And actually, ALL had the same dye lot!!! One sleeve was brighter than the other. But, it only shows up really in photos. In person you just don’t notice it. I think your solution is going to work out, good luck on the blocking.
I think I mentioned this a few days ago. And yes- once blocked, the frogged yarn will relax nicely with the new yarn. It looks great, though!