You ready for a jewelry rant?

I really have a bit of a story to tell aside from a jewelry rant, but since I'm doing this post to procrastinate from cleaning my room, I'll stick to the shorter topic. The other will come later. :)

So... I make jewelry, I make a lot of jewelry in a lot of different mediums. Chainmaile, wire, beaded, rubber, leather, clay, ect.ect. I love branching out and trying mew materials and mediums and such, and I've really wanted to start working more with precious metals (bigger money hehe). So as you can imagine, when I heard about MetalClay, I was super excited!

- For those that don't know, MetalClay is exactly what it sounds like, it's clay that has tiny particles or precious metal in it. When it's fired the clay burns away and you're left with solid silver, gold, copper or what have you.

To get on with the story, I finally broke down and bought myself a 10gram bag of silver clay and some stones and all the stuff to fire and make some nice rings and stuff. And yesterday it came in the mail, Yay! However, I went out last night with some friends and didn't have too much time to mess with it until I got home at 3am or so. But I did mess with it for a while last night and I'm pretty disappointed. first thing I realized is that 10 grams is not a lot. In fact, its nothing, it's depressing how very minuscule 10 grams is. The second disappointing thing about my new investment is that it's very hard to work with. the clay is crumbly and dry. I tried to solve that by adding a little bit of water, but that just looses you a lot of clay because it just drips or sticks to whatever you're using to shape it with (fingers, tools, table).
And finally, the firing process... Super cool because it can be done with a handheld butane torch, but there's some problems. The main one being that when the clay turns to metal it warps from what ever design you've put into it. So the intricate sculpting I did on a little pendant I was trying to make for Kitten pretty much melted away into one blob. Not cool. And the ring that I made, set with a small garnet stone, warped so bad it was two sizes too small, and sharp and ended up busting and dropping the stone. Also not cool. The side effect problem from this is that once you have the metal piece with no design on it, it's too hard to carve or shape or anything.
So basically I wasted half of my tiny supply of sucky, overpriced clay to make unusable and crappy stuff. I'm not pleased.