.925

When you purchase sterling silver jewelry, it should have .925 stamped into it or incorporated into the design somewhere. This number means that the product you have should have 92.5% silver and the other 7.5% is often composed of other metals like copper. Adding other metals helps strengthen silver which is used in jewelry, dishware, musical instruments and medical instruments. Pure silver is far too soft and maleable to be of much use in these products. When you find some tarnish or corrosion in silver, it is the metals mixed with the silver that are reacting to environmental factors such as sulfur, sodium and oxygen. Silver itself, is not highly reactive with oxnygen or water.

Silver prices fluctuate a lot. The price of silver per gram is now more than twice what I paid for it when I first started making jewelry. As the economy gets worse, silver and gold prices often go up and as the economy improves, precious metal prices come back down, in general.

One of the things I would highly recommend, to protect your silver jewelry from becoming too tarnished is to keep it in small ziplock baggies, forcing all the air out of the bag. This will keep your silver shiny for a long time. You can buy commercial products for cleaning tarnished silver but you really have to use caution if your jewelry has any pearls or gemstones because the harsh chemicals in the cleaning agents can destroy the finish on those.

If you want to clean your silver using household products, give these ideas a try!
You can try sprinkling baking soda on a damp cloth and rub it on the silver to remove tarnish. Some people use white toothpaste and a tooth brush work well. Rinse the silver off and dry the silver with a hair dryer to keep water spots from clouding it.

Another option I discovered once by experimenting with different things around the house. I saw an infomercial, where you could buy this metal plate that you put in a sink of hot water and added baking soda and then immersed your silver in it.

The idea was that the tarnish would transfer to the metal plate. So I put a large aluminum foil sheet in a stainless steel pot. I add 3-4 inches of water and add 1/4cup of baking soda, 1/4 cup of salt and a squirt of Dawn dishwashing liquid. (Dawn has degreasers in it more so than other soaps, so that will help remove body oils from the jewelry.) I toss in a handful of change from my purse, and a few nails and a few metal odds and ends like keys, that find their way into my catch all drawer. Bring the water to a boil. Put the silver into the hot water and let it sit for a short time to see if it is going to remove the tarnish. Truthfully, I think you can leave out the change, nails and metal odds and ends, I just tossed them in because the informercial mentioned that there were a lot of different metals in their magic plate that helped remove the tarnish off the silver. Plus, it was sort of magical looking to the kids when they were little to watch all the ingredients go in and the tarnish come off.

You will begin to notice the tarnish transfers to the aluminum foil. When you remove the silver, rinse if off well and again dry it with a hair dryer. This method is not useful or recommended for jewelry that has an antiqued finish and definately do not use this method with base metal that is simpy plated with silver! If your silver has a lot of tarnish, you may need to do this process several times.

One last bit of advice to help protect your sterling silver jewerly. DO NOT WEAR IT IN THE POOL, HOT TUB, SHOWER! I have found that my sterling silver jewelry tarnishes a lot more when I wear it in the shower and I suspect it has something to do with the salt in the soft water treatment we have. Harsh chemicals in pools and hot tubs also tarnish and erode sterling silver jewelry.

Holly Russell Godard