Have you ever despaired at your tarnished jewellery, thinking, that will take hours of elbow grease and silver metal polish and blackened fingers to resurrect?
Well, I have an easy answer for you.

Aluminum foil, washing powder and hot water. Its that simple. 😀 

Line a bowl with aluminium foil, then add washing powder (sodium carbonante) and hot water.

1 litre of hot water to 1/2 cup of powder and then place your jewellery in the water and listen to the sizzle.

The tarnish will simply melt away. Rinse off and buff.

The solution stared working immediately, a minute was enough for the least tarnished pieces and up to 5 minutes for the heavily tarnished. By then the water was very dirty.

So going back for a second go would probably have completed the clean. I then removed the pieces from the solution and gently washed off the solution in warm water and a bit of dishwashing liquid and an old toothbrush to get into the crevices.

The instructions can also be found on the back of Lectric Washing soda packet. You can check out more tips at  https://lectric.com.au/pages/around-the-home

The before and after photos show a huge improvement in tarnish removal. Some items performing better than others. The item that fared the worse, was the “Bali” earrings, but I suspect that was due to them not being silver. The other items that struggled was a mokume game bangle that was a mix of silver and nickel and a necklace that was sterling silver and bronze. The lesson here, don’t mix metals in your washing soda bath.

The hotter the water the better the reaction, but if you are including jewellery with stones in it, I would be vary wary of the ”shock” the stone undergoes when being dumped into boiling water, it may cause stones such as diamonds to cleave so instead use “just” hot water with stones. I also wouldn’t put opals or pearls in the solution but everything else should be fine.

So no more reasons to pack away your favourite pieces of jewellery because you don’t have the time to clean them, this method will get the job done in under 5 minutes.

Let me know how your cleaning spree goes.