Heigh Ho, Silver, Away!

We are going to have a small dinner party soon for a few folks who have hosted us with some wonderful meals. Other than immediate family, we haven't done much entertaining over the last few years, so it'll be fun to do it up a little. I'm going to pull out the wedding china and silverware, and the monogrammed wine glasses that one of our friends carried on her lap on the plane all the way across the country to our wedding 25 years ago.

We'll use the hobnail milk glass salt and pepper dips with miniature silver spoons and the gold napkins I monogrammed with silver napkin rings. When I started pulling everything out of the cupboards and drawers, it was pretty obvious that the silver was very tarnished and would need a good cleaning. Yuck! I actually garage saled a beautiful serving dish with a silver base a few years ago because I figured I'd never take the time to clean it, so would never use it. Rats ... big mistake!

I'm not planning to use the salad serving set since I got a gorgeous beaded pair last year, but I figured I'd clean them along with the other pieces.

The Internet is truly my friend. I did a search for removing silver tarnish and this wonderful site popped up with extremely simple directions. All you need is aluminum foil, baking soda and boiling water.

After I poured the boiling, bubbling baking soda water over the silver pieces, the air actually reeked of sulfur. It was pretty stinky, but I figured that meant it was working.

And as it says in the directions, since our silver was so tarnished, I reheated the water, added a little more baking soda and soaked it again. That water turned so gray and dirty.

I rinsed off each piece and took an old dishrag rag to it.

The tarnish easily wiped right off and everything sparkled.

That was a pretty quick, satisfying, successful cleaning project. From now on, if I see an interesting piece of silver at a garage sale or flea market, I'm buying it!