Painting a Blue Sky Roving

This project started with a view of the winter sky:














I tried painting some rovings to reproduce the various intensities of blue:












And I learned a few things!
1) It's easy to put too much dye on the roving. I did let these rovings sit 10-15 minutes for the fibers to absorb the dye, but there was a lot of dye left to be absorbed by my blotters (see the roll of paper towels in the center of the above photo? The roving on the left has been blotted. The one on the right still needs blotting.)
2) The end results only vaguely resemble the painted roving. This may change with experience!
3) Painting rovings takes much more time than vat dyeing!

The final result:

The two rovings on the left are the ones I painted. The other four are different microwave dyeing experiments using the same dye.

The end results are cool--I think they'll spin up beautifully--but I'm not thrilled with either of the processes I tried! Good thing they're just experiments!