The Good, the Bad and the Snuggly

I finished knitting the afghan I started!

Just 2 and a half months ago, this project looked like this:

If anyone had told me that I would finish knitting an afghan by the end of October, I would have laughed.  (This was supposed to be my longterm project.) But somehow, I found myself picking up the needles at every opportunity and before I knew it, I had seven knitted strips.

Instead of sewing the strips together, I crocheted them together.  Here is the reverse side showing a row of crochet:

I really like the stability the crochet added, and it was a real timesaver too.

As I went along, I tried to keep continuity in each strip so that the stripes would line up when sewn together.  When I laid the strips side by side, it looked like I was doing an okay job.  I expected that there would be some variation, but not quite this much:

I kind of wish I had paid less attention to trying to match the stripes.  In that case, I might have something that looked casually unmatched on purpose.

I think the problem was that I used skeins of yarns from different dye lots.  I thought that since there was such a range of color in the yarn, that if there were a subtle change in the dyes from skein to skein that it would be okay.  What I didn't consider was that different dye lots apparently had differences in the lengths of the bands of color.

However the stripes may fall, I love this afghan!  The yarn is very soft, and the weight has a nice drape to it.  It fills in any drafts around your legs.   Don't tell my quilts I'm admitting this, but  I just might prefer the afghan to put over my lap on a cold night.
(Did I really just type that?)

I still have quite a bit of work ahead of me to tie in all the loose yarn:

The nice thing is that the afghan does double duty as a legwarmer while I'm working on it.

Now what will I do for my longterm project?