Today I want to share a quick little tip with you that will save you time, costs mere pennies and leaves you with fantastic results. What’s not to love about that!?

I love creating my jewelry pieces from solid core wire, not the plated stuff. Copper, silver and jewelers brass. While cleaning the first two is relatively straight forward, the brass has been giving me fits. I chose jewelers brass, because it lacks the bright, brash yellow cast of regular brass and resembles the warmer glow of 14k gold, due to its higher copper content.

But it is still brass and that means that unlike real gold, it will tarnish and look gross eventually.

So far, I have always reached for my trusted jewelry cloth and just sat and polished, polished and then polished some more. Buffin’ up the brass made my hands hurt and somehow it still never looked quite as evenly shiny and sparkly as I had imagined. In short – too much work for too little shine.

So, what to do? Brasso? Maybe, worth a try… While I looked for my  Brasso, I came upon this bottle of lemon juice, a major cleaning staple of mine.

And I remembered that an acid should clean the tarnish right off. So I decided to give it a try. Here is a picture of three bracelets: the one on the left was cleaned by being submerged in lemon juice for just a couple of minutes, then rinsed with water and dried with a paper towel. The  middle one was polished with a jewelry cloth and the one on the right hadn’t been touched yet.

Actually, this picture doesn’t begin to show just how tarnished the bracelet on the right was!

Another before shot:

And here it is after a quick bath, rinse and dry:

All this with so much less effort than the less effective method! I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do than sit around and polish jewelry!  I would rather be making it than cleaning it any day! So next time your brass jewelry turns grungy, pour yourself some lemon juice in a bowl and let the acid do its magic!

*One word of caution: all of the pieces I cleaned with this method were strictly brass, no other metals, beads or stones. I will try this method with some of the beads I use frequently to see how they hold up and post those results for you very soon!

And don’t forget to stop by and like my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/echoesofela to get the latest news and pictures!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

Karin