Decorated Chaos: Pinned It-Done It-Pinterest Silver Cleaner

Remember the old dirty silver platter I bought from the Goodwill?

Disgusting, right? It was half priced and I can see why. People probably passed it up because it was so tarnished, but not me. I could see beyond all that.

Just look at the engraving and detail around the edges. To me this was a diamond in the rough so I bought it with the idea in mind that I would try the silver cleaning tip that everyone is passing around on Pinterest.

I started by trying to clean the platter with my silver cleaning cloth that I use for cleaning my silver jewelry.

You can see on the left where I used the cloth. It looked better than the original right side, but it still wasn't to my liking so I decided to go ahead and try the Pinterest recipe for silver cleaning.

I referred to several different sites and each one had pretty much the same recipe tweaked slightly to their liking, but the basic recipe calls for:

Hot water

Salt (kosher or regular iodized salt is what most used)

Baking soda

Aluminum foil

I lined my sink with the foil.

Then filled it with HOT water that I heated in the microwave and sprinkled in four tablespoons of regular table salt, then let it soak.

See the salt clinging to the platter?

Here it is after about 20 minutes of soaking.

I'm seeing small bubbles and the tarnishing is starting to lift slightly.

Then after about 30 minutes, I could really see it starting to come clean AND I smelled a slight smell from the reaction of ingredients.

There is a chemical reaction going on with the aluminum foil, silver, and salt.

That is how this recipe works and you could definitely smell it if you were right up on the sink.

Here is what the foil looked like after I was done. You can see the discolored area which is where the salt affected the foil.

OK, so back to the soaking. I started with salt but decided now to add two tablespoons of baking soda too.
I was in "science experiment" mode!!!!

After 30-40 minutes I decided enough time had passed so I removed the platter and dried it off with a paper towel.

I was a little surprised that it didn't come out sparkling clean, keep in mind I still had to buff off the tarnished with a soft cloth, BUT I will say that it came clean very easily.

The soaking process helped lift off the tarnish, for sure!

And here it is!

All clean and shiny!

I will be honest and tell you that I was not totally "WOWED" by this process since I still had to use a cloth to buff out some of the tarnish, but I was happy with how much easier it was to buff out after soaking in the mixture.

I would like to try it again but tweak it a little bit by using a different salt.

In the end I give it a thumbs up and can't believe how nice my platter looks. It still has some rust spots but that's OK.

I want it to look old, just not DIRTY!