Make Do and Mend Silver Polish…

I have a pair of silver earrings that I wear pretty much everyday, and in the way of silver things, they get pretty tarnished.

Now, we are not in possession of a vast amount of silver…and even if we were, given the state of the rest of the house, I am pretty sure that polishing the silver would not make it onto the weekly chores list. So we don’t actually have our own pot of silver polish.
In the past, I have ‘borrowed’ a little smidge from my mother-in-law, but I keep forgetting, so I want to have something I can use at home, and I don’t want to go and buy a whole pot of silver polish.

At the Waste Watcher’s Green Clean event earlier on this year, I was introduced to the delights of making your own, by basically whizzing up a banana skin with some bicarbonate of soda.
This worked surprisingly well, and I think would be good to do if I was cleaning lots of silver, but I’m not, and I really can’t be bothered to get the whizzer all mucky just for one tiny pair of earrings.

So…. I read somewhere-I think in this book

that you can use tomato ketchup to clean tarnished silver, and I decided to give it a go. And I can exclusively reveal…..

That it doesn’t work 🙁

Here is the before….

Here is the during…

And here is the after…

No discernible difference except they now have the faint whiff of tomato ketchup.

I am starting to think that maybe the people who wrote the book were having a bit of laugh.
Maybe I should try out some of the other tips too in some kind of (un)scientific experiment to see if any of them actually work or if it’s just one enormous hoax…