Turning the spectrum inside-out

I bought this "Dark Rainbow" yarn set at the Calgary Fibre Festival in mid-November and it (along with numerous other skeins of yarn) has been sitting on my desk ever since. I like having this heap o' yarn in plain view ... lets me see colours alongside each other to see how well they combine or clash (the heap gets rearranged regularly, mainly because I tend to knock it over reaching for things, so I'm continually getting exposed to new combos.

Anyhow, enough of my excuses for not putting my shopping away. ;p The yarn set in its originally packaging has been kinda bugging me ... love the colours but there was a wrongness about them. Finally figured out it's the yellow and the green. All the other colours are tonally close to their neighbours and flow into each other but this pair have a fairly high light/dark contrast and it's visually jarring (to my eyes, anyway). So I pulled the yarns out of the package and separated the combatants and oh, arranging the colours with the outer ends of the spectrum in the middle works so much better. A definite sense of flowing smoothly from dark to light as well as from colour to colour. (older photo of packaged yarn is colour-true; today's comparison photos are victims of wonky winter daylight is wonky winter daylight). So when I finally get 'round to knitting something from these the result will be a rainbow from another dimension where light breaks up differently. ;-)