I suck at dyeing roving

I'm pretty good and intuitive with color. I can pretty much mix any color with the primaries: red, blue, yellow and/or the light palette: cyan, magenta, yellow. Zona can probably attest to that, since she has been over to my house for a few of our "Wine, Dye & Knit" parties. I can even get color changes when dyeing cellulose fibers. I still will not say I'm expert, not until I learn and master natural dyes (probably never get to it!), but I will say that I don't do a shabby job. Alas, not so with roving.

I found out that I suck at dyeing roving. I've dyed roving one other time. It was a small amount for needle felting, so I didn't care really how it turned out, but it was what I wanted, so I ended up being over-confident when I dyed 2 days ago. I needed to dye a commissioned project and wanted to dye for both my SP10 and Dye-No-Mite pals. My yarns turned out great. I then decided to dye some roving, some for one of the pals, and some for myself (My friend is letting me borrow her wheel for 2-3 months!). According to the roving dye master Zona, roving is easy peasy and sucks up dye like nothing else. Not for me. It took forever. It didn't help that I was using reds, oranges, and fuschias. I used those same colors for my yarns and the yarns turned ou great. I could not get color saturation with the roving though, despite having tossed in some synthrapol to help with the lanolin. In the end, I decided not to aim for the rich color I envisioned, for fear of felting the roving, which it kinda did and I ended up with salmon-ish and pink-orangish colors.

I wanted more deep bright colors like these:

and then add some hints of cool tones and rusty tones.

Maybe I'll try again in a couple of weeks. I'm planning to dye cellulose fibers next.