DIY Silver Cleaner

I was recently tasked with fixing a bracelet for my mother in law. While I was looking at the pieces, I realized there were a few numbers marked very small in one area---these numbers meant that the bracelet was some sort of silver. So before fixing the bracelet, I decided to give the pieces a good cleaning as they were quite tarnished. Here's a recipe for homemade silver jewelry cleaner. I don't know if it'll work with other metals, but I definitely wouldn't use it on rocks, gemstones, pearls, etc.

I ended up trying two different recipes because at one point, I was concerned the intricate beads were not getting clean enough. I used recipe 1 first for all of the beads and then recipe 2 for follow up with the dirtier beads.

Recipe 1

1/2 cup boiling water

1/4 cup vinegar

3 tsp salt

3 tsp baking soda

Recipe 2

1 cup boiling water

1 tbs baking soda

tin foil

bowl

***You can make larger amounts, I only needed to clean the parts of a bracelet so I just made a small amount.

Line a bowl with tin foil and bring water to a boil. Once the bowl is lined, lay your jewelry out on the tin foil (which I forgot to do until I had already poured in the vinegar).

Mix the baking soda and salt with the boiling water. Pour into tin foil lined bowl.

Slowly pour the vinegar into the jewelry bowl. Be prepared for some chemical reactions :-)

Let the mixture sit for 15-30 minutes. Some of the pieces cleaned up faster than the more intricate ones, so I removed pieces as they were ready. If you're short on time, you could use a toothbrush or q-tip to scrub the harder to clean pieces.

After the soak with the beads in recipe 1, I boiled more water and put the dirtier beads in recipe 2. This got a lot of the black gunk off. At one point I was worried the intricate beads might not actually be silver, so I took a toothpick and scraped a bit---the tarnish started coming right off. So I let the beads soak in recipe 2 for about 20 minutes.