Setnaffa, how many ingots did you lose per circlet? Were you using just straight 100 mining, or 105 (100 with gloves)? And did you use a salvage bag to recycle?
Note the difference in ingot consumption, smelting your successes (can't do much about crafting failures...)
100 Mining, normal smelting: 3 ingots back each (you have to have 101.1 mining to get to 2/3 back)
100 Mining, using Salvage bag: 4 ingots back each (3 + 1 for the bag)
101.1 to 105 mining, normal smelting: 4 ingots back (2/3 of 6)
101.1 to 105 mining, salvage bag: 5 ingots back (4 + 1 from bag)
Depending on which you used, the cost using the optimum return could be significantly less than what you used.
Note that I only needed 900 ingots, at the optimum (5 ingot) return, to go from 110 to 111.1 (and this was after getting my guaranteed gain on something else an hour earlier), and after finishing my training session, still recovered 218 of the 900 (for a net cost under 700 of the 900)