Final and best silver cleaning bright idea!

Ok, this is an absolutely wonderful way to clean sterling silver using ONLY things you have around the house - no chemicals!  yay!!! Best of all, it really does work great.  Just to prove it, I did a little experiment this week with some pretty grungy sterling silver jewelry - you can see what I started with at left - nice earrings but boy are they nasty looking!  Let's see if we can clean them up a bit!  Following are the results of my effort!  Click here to see the previous posts on cleaning your jewelry!

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WHAT YOU NEED:

1.  baking soda
2.  bowl/container
3. aluminum foil
4.  boiling water

That's it.  You are ready to clean!

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Step 1:
Scrunch up the foil (is scrunch a word??) and put it in the bottom of your container.  Just make sure the foil is bumpy, NOT smooth.  The silver will get cleaned where it touches the foil so you want a lot of "surface" foil for the silver to lay against.  With me so far?

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Step 2:
Sterling silver on top of the foil - it's kind of hard to see the earrings here but they are laying on top of the foil - sort of nestled down in there - see??

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Step 3:
NOW, we get to the fun part.  Sprinkle baking soda on top of the jewelry.  This is not a science....I am liberal with the soda.  Just dump some on - you can add more later!  Then pour boiling water on top, just to cover it.  It will immediately start to bubbly & fizz & you may smell a sulfur type of smell - getting rid of the oxidation - hurray!!   Move the jewelry around a bit with a wooden spoon or chopstick - whatever you have on hand.  Remember that it gets cleanest when it comes into contact with the foil.  At this point, I let it do it's fizzy thing, then I add a little more water & maybe some more soda - I want it to fizz as much as it can & baking soda is cheap so I keep adding it with water until it stops fizzing & bubbling - then, rinse well and........

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WHOA!  Check it out!  I would probably now use my sweet little Sunshine Polishing Cloth to finish it off but it is not really necessary - these babies are clean & shiny!  


So - that's it - so easy, so cheap, so GREEN - Give it a try & let me know your results!!  :D

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BEFORE 

AFTER