I've been doing a lot of swatching in the past few weeks, both for unbloggable projects and for this capelet (thanks, Karen and Erin-- "capelet" is a much better term than "poncho"!). I really loved the Dream in Color "Grey Tabby" swatch for the capelet, but I only had two skeins of it, and had trouble locating more, so I decided to try another one of their many tempting colorways. 
My nearby LYSs don't carry Dream in Color Classy, so after looking at many of their colorways on different websites, and worked into different projects on Ravelry, I finally bought some Visual Purple online fromWoolgirl (great store and wonderful customer service, by the way). Unfortunately, each of the three skeins was noticeably different in color from the others-- not completely unexpected for handpainted yarns, which don't usually have dye lots. So I decided that, as is generally recommended with these yarns, I would have to alternate skeins, working a couple of rounds in one, and then switching to another. 
After a few rounds I put this project aside for a week or so-- I just got scared by how very intensely purple it was! (Much more vivid than it looks in these photos.) I started thinking about how my wardrobe tends toward neutrals, and wondered if I would ever dare to wear such a royally assertive hue...but every time I glanced over at the fledgling capelet, I was struck by how gorgeous the color variations were, and how they changed in different lights (the bluer photo was shot in daylight only, and the redder one under incandescent light and daylight combined). So after I got used to the purple, I started working again.
But I'm afraid this project is destined for frogging, for a few reasons; I might have persevered if only one of them was true, but the combination was too much. 1) It's a pain to switch skeins every couple of rounds. 2) More importantly, it leaves little floats on the wrong side, and when I swatched this stitch pattern, I realized that the wrong side is very interesting, so I want this capelet to be reversible. If the yarn wasn't superwash, I would have done felted joins-- but it is, so I didn't (and what a pain all those felted joins would have been!). 3) Most importantly, I think it would have been too big. It was a bit tricky measuring my swatch because of the way the stitch pattern slants.
In the future, I will try to do as Connie recommended: buy my handpainted yarn from a bricks-and-mortar store, so I can match the skeins, and forget about alternating from skeins while knitting. Luckily, I had also purchased (online from WEBS) five skeins of Dream in Color Classy in Deep Seaflower, a wonderful combination of blues and violets, and was able to match three of those quite closely-- I think. So I've already started my capelet again, with fewer stitches and a slight change in stitch pattern. Wish me luck!
*Rhodopsin-- the retinal pigment that allows us to see in low-light conditions-- is also known as "visual purple." From Wikipedia: "Exposed to light, the pigment immediately photobleaches, and it takes about 30 minutes to regenerate fully in humans." This is why it takes your eyes awhile to adapt when you go from a bright to a low light environment. Did you know that your eyes dark-adapt separately from each other? This is kind of fun: in a dim room, when your eyes are fully dark-adapted (so you can see objects in the room fairly well), cover one completely, and then turn a bright light on for a few seconds. When you turn it off, the uncovered eye will hardly be able to see anything, but if you uncover the other eye, it will still be dark-adapted, and you'll be able to see just as well as you could before!
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