Mismatched Dye Lots

If you are following along with my blog, you know of my most recent Fail, caused fully by over confidence in my own memory, and lack of project preparation.  I ended up ordering another skein online as I could source none locally.  Now I wait.  The likelihood I'll get the same dye lot I bought at my LYS is extremely remote.  So remote in fact, I think I'd have better luck in the lottery.

I'm very fortunate that the project this happened on will not be badly affected by the mismatched dye lots.  If it is noticeable at all, it will be very subtle.  The recipient will be entirely too thrilled with the gift to care, if in fact he did notice.  This mismatch will only matter to me.

So this situation has given me time to think about dye lots.  In most projects, mismatched dye lots spell disaster.  A single color project with mismatched dye lots will have an obvious color shift in some lights, while not so obvious in others.  This can be downplayed by alternating skeins with each row, or it can end up looking striped.

Multicolored projects like "scrap-ghans" can actually benefit from multiple dye lots, seemingly contributing more color and variety to the end project.  This got me thinking... in what other ways can I make mismatched dye lots "art" instead of "fail"?

I'm curious what could be achieved working with a collection of different dye lots of the same color.  Could an afghan project look like a study in monochromatic tones?  Would it be too subtle too notice or would it be just subtle enough that the effect would be unique and classy?

Have you ever intentionally created a project with mismatched dyelots?  What was the result?