Cleaning Silver

Hello and Happy Friday friends!  This post is inspired by an article I read on a blog called Miss Mustard Seed. Marian, Miss Mustard Seed, recently wrote about using real silver flatware for her everyday silver ware.  I'm paraphrasing here, but the point of her article was to use what you love every day instead of just keeping it in a drawer and pulling it out once or twice a year on a special occasion.

I really thought this was a brilliant point and have been trying to do this more lately.  In fact, I recently boxed up a ton of dishes and other things and donated them, keeping only my "nice" dishes and glasses.  Since I do have young kids I held on to a set of plastic dishes and silverware from Ikea for snacks and outdoor eating, but I am trying to use the "good" stuff for most of our everyday use.  I even let the kids eat off it when they are having meals.  This brings me to the silverware part of this post.  I just couldn't seem to get the wooden box set of real silver flatware out and use it for everyday.  I didn't want to lose a piece or have one go down the drain and get dinged up by the garbage disposal, but I was really sick of the flatware we got from Target 9 years ago... What to do??

As luck would have it, I stumbled upon a huge lot of sterling plated silver flatware at the thrift store today and got a great deal on it!  There are two partial sets, one has 8 each of the soup spoon, tea spoon, salad fork, dinner fork and knife, plus 4 serving spoons and a butter knife, and the other just has spoons and forks, but was a little heavier and really pretty.  So they both came home with me, but, they were in rough shape friends.  My kids looked at me like I was nuts for suggesting they would be eating with them.  I knew the tarnish would come off with some silver polish, but I didn't have any on hand.  What I did have was a house full of kids out of school early because of a minimum day and a ton of rain and wind going on. This made a "quick" trip to the hardware store virtually impossible.  I decided to google natural silver cleaner and found this idea, which I thought would never work, but it did!!

Here is a before...

And here is a during...

And the after...

Here's how I did it.  Bring 8 cups of water to a boil with 2 tbs of baking soda and 2 sheets of aluminum foil.  Dip each piece into the boiling water for about 15 seconds.  Then wash normally and dry.  Perfectly cleaned non tarnished silver without any elbow grease or yucky messy polish.  You're welcome friends.