Thursday, April 7, 2011

science is fun useful!*

so i have this lovely silver tea service that was my grandmother's, which i've been meaning to polish since high school (which, if we're generous, was 10 years ago...)



and i've decided that i'm finally going to get it done, but hate polishing stuff, and it's super yuk to be around, so i took to google to see if there was a way to make my own (non-toxic-y) silver polish, and google did me one better...i can make my own silver DIP! so i don't even have to polish, i can just soak. which is exactly my speed. tested it on a small scale with my bracelet last night, and it seemed to work relatively well, so i'm going to go big tonight...

so, it totally worked, right before my eyes, score! the coffee pot still needs some work, but i think that this is good enough for now. better than a half-assed attempt, but not quite full assed. also, as i was doing some (very slight, let's be honest) buffing, i thought "this would have been the better part of some poor woman's job back in the day" and that made me VERY happy that it wasn't even slightly part of my job description.




*while the watching it un-oxidize before my eyes was kind of fun, this was also work, so more useful than fun. although i do recognize that science is, in fact, fun...just not in this instance.

3 comments:

  1. turned out freaking well! score :)

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  2. How'd you do it? I've tried an aluminum-in-salt-water dip, but the results took a long time and were less than stunning.

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  3. It's salt and baking soda in hot water with aluminum foil. Apparently it works best when the silver is touching the foil, which seemed to be true. And I just dumped a lot of both salt and baking soda in...

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