Cleaning Sterling Silver Naturally

My studio is “under rearrangement”, since yesterday. Currently disarray is winning but the upper hand will be regained, no doubt. It’s already starting to look like a place I can work more comfortably. A tragedy occured while cleaning some of my jewelry! It was a freak accident- I was rinsing a necklace someone had lovingly made for me with a beautiful carved brick red agate horse pendant. It’s a long necklace, and it slipped a little from my hands and the horse swung into the side of a Pyrex cooking pot in the sink I’d been using for boiling the natural cleaning solution, and his head was, oh– removed. I didn’t cry but it was close! He was too thin in the neck to even try gluing back together.

Anyway- I don’t like using commercial silver cleaners. Sometimes they leave an etched appearance, sometimes they will seem to clean a piece wonderfully once but then it will never look as clean again on subsuquent cleanings. Plus they stink, my hands don’t like them, and smelling like that they can’t possibly be good for the environment. So- thanks to the Internet, I now clean my sterling in a much more “friendly” way. You line a pan (bowl, whatever to fit what you’re cleaning) with aluminum foil, shiny side up. Place your pieces to be cleaned in the pan, making sure that they make contact with the foil. Add to that some pretty hot water with baking soda dissolved in it (some add a pinch of salt) and pour it in the pan. The result will be a bit stinky from the sulfur released during the cleaning and you may see a couple of black flakes float up from really dirty pieces. To me it still smells better than the “acid in a jar” stuff. Check out this site for a better explanation: http://www.darylscience.com/Demos/Silver.html. It works!

I use a little less baking soda and still get great results, but I also rub the pieces a little between my fingers when rinsing or before rinsing if they look like they still have a little yuck on them. Be sure to rinse well and dry carefully. I’ve had two pieces that had a lot of crevices not come as clean as everything else, but using the polishing cloth immediately after cleaning and drying took care of it all.