Working with clay

I wrote a great deal about clay in my journal so I'll sum it up on here.  I wanted to experiment with clay because I found that I was only working with a few materials.  I decided that I would make the below design from clay because I had made it numerous times with card so I was quite familiar with it:

Jo advised me to blow up the size so it would be easier to make; the pieces that I made turned out to be double the size of the card models.  In short, I didn't like clay.  I found that it was messy and imprecise to work with and it is also annoyingly temperemental.  I spent a great deal of time spraying the slab pieces with water so that they were porous enough to be stuck together.  Although the end designs were much sturdier than card, the end did not justify the means.  However, Jo did point out that I wasn't using clay for it's intended purpose, rather, adapting it to what I wanted to do.  Even so, I'll never use it again.