Cleaning Silver the safe and fast way

Hello again. Welcome to the second post of the day. 

My dear mother passed away quite a number of years ago. She left me some pieces of silver flatware that are really quite lovely but I seldom use them. Because I have to clean them. It is a chore that I do not care for. At all.

While browsing through one of my natural cleaning books looking for something completely different I found a recipe to clean silver. The amazing thing is that is uses the same two items that I use to clean practically everything in our house. Baking Soda and White Vinegar. Well, I simply had to try this. I took pictures along the way. The results are nothing short of astounding. Here goes.

I used a plain ordinary plastic washing up basin, nothing fancy. I lined it with aluminium foil wrap.

Here are a few pieces of the silver. You can see how very tarnished the fork is in particular. It has probably not been cleaned in years and years. Shame on me.

Lay all the pieces of silver to be cleaned on the bottom of the basin. Each piece MUST touch the foil wrap. It does not matter whether you are cleaning sterling silver or silver plate (which is what all of this is).

Gather your extensive list of supplies. :)  Baking soda and white vinegar. Bring a full kettle of water to boil.

Now, sprinkle the baking soda liberally over the silver pieces.

Pour on the vinegar. It will bubble up quite a lot. I probably used 1-2 cups in total.

Now, quick like a bunny, pour over the boiling water. All of the silver pieces MUST be completely submerged.

The chemical reaction, and I have absolutely no idea what it is called, nor do I care, will start to work almost immediately. It is simply amazing. Here is the same fork after a couple of minutes in the solution. It is substantially cleaner. If I was planning to use this, I would likely give it a quick buff with a silver cleaner or a silver cloth. The nice thing is that I would not need to spend 20 - 30 minutes scrubbing away with the silver polish to get the worst of the tarnish off.

Here is what the pan looks like when you are done. You can see how the foil has discoloured from all the tarnish that has been transferred to it. Now, I do not know if you can use the foil more than once but I am going to give it a try and see.

Well, thanks a lot for joining me again today. This has been a revelation for me I must say. All this work took about 10 minutes and the most of that was waiting for the kettle to boil. And the even better part, no harmful toxins were used. Yeah. 

See you next time. Cheers.