A couple of people commented yesterday asking how this yarn (Pendle Aran in Leaf Piles, below) knits up, and I thought I'd make a full post with my answer.
There's not much point with variegated skeins as its appearance will vary from skein to skein and depending your stitch pattern, the shape of what you're making, your tension, and so on.
I completely appreciate why you're asking - honestly I do, but you could knit say a triangular shawl up in one skein and not get any pooling for example, but then you could knit a hat with a different skein and find that there is colour pooling because the rounds and shape of the item is completely different. I hope this makes sense. And yes it does make buying variegated hand dyed yarn a bit of a gamble - again I really do appreciate this but it is what makes it so unique.
Also with around 200 regular colourways which can be changeable that's a vast amount of knitting and crocheting to do, and some (most?) of it would be a complete waste of time as the next dyelot might look a bit different. I'd then have really disappointed people who thought their yarn would look exactly like my samples but doesn't.
What I can say is: firstly when I do variegated or dappled colourways I do my utmost to make sure the colours are randomly spread to hopefully avoid pooling, or much pooling. I also try to make sure the skeins in the batch get roughly the same amount of variation although that isn't always doable. And finally if you are worried about variegated yarns pooling go for projects with varying row/round lengths, and if you're using more than one skein you should really alternate skeins every couple of rows/rounds to really get a good spread of colours and variation.
I hope that helps!