Fading Like a Flower

There comes a time in each man's life when he questions whether or not RGB LED's absolutely need to be incorporated in all the functions he's programming into his wife's Victorian-era bustle dress.  The answer, in my case at least, is "no, no they don't."

It wasn't an easy decision, of course.  On the one hand, the RGB LED's separate red green and blue lamps can be set independently to mock up just about any color, and you can shift and fade through the spectrum at will.  On the other, each of those lamps consume just as many resources as any standard lamp; eg 30ma and a precious pwm pin (the Uno only has six.)  

Unless you want to add an analog mux to the system (am opting to keep things light and simple at this point,) this means you only get two RGB's per strand.  That is unless I run them in parallel 1, A, 2, B, 3, C, 4 (etc...) fashion (where "A" represents the first RGB, "B" represents the second, and the numbers represent the static LED's in line.) This would give me a potential 9 RGB's per strand+9 standard LED's for a total of 18 per side, or 36 total per strand (there will be 2 strands.)  The only function both would interact in would be 'solid,' where the RGB's could be set to a standard red, green, or blue, maxing out only 1 lamp.