Cleaning Tarnished Copper the Easy Way

My great aunt left me a set of antique tea glasses in copper holders with copper saucers. I decided it was time to clean them up and put them in the hutch so we could enjoy them. The reason they've been hidden away is because the copper was really tarnished. I've polished copper with one of those special cloths before and vowed that the next time I used one there had better be a note on the vessel indicating a genie lived within. There was no genie anywhere near the tea set, so I found the lazy girl's way to clean copper is to mix a few ingredients and let the concoction do all the work.

What I used:

1 cup white vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup flour (more or less)

I mixed these ingredients in a medium size bowl to make a paste. It was probably a bit runnier than it should've been, so after covering each piece in the goo, I left them sitting in the mixing bowl to avoid making a bigger mess and expanding the project. I also wasn't sure what the goo would do to my counter top in the kitchen. You might want to do this over newspapers or something to protect your workspace from the acidic mixture.

Every 15 minutes I went back to check on my project and found that the goo had started to turn green near the copper pieces. I took this as a sign that it was working. I could tell from the color showing through the goo that it wasn't yet finished, so I scooped a little more goo over it, left it alone and returned to the computer. There was no sense watching it, was there?

I ended up leaving the pieces in the vinegar/salt/flour mixture for nearly two hours. Hey, it's better than me rubbing them with a cloth for that long! I rinsed them with warm water and dried them with a dish towel, then looked them over. The handles are made of bronze and the hand crafted designs on the copper are quite intricate.

Looking back, it might've been a good idea to test an inconspicuous area to make sure there would be no unexpected changes to the copper. All's well that ends well, though, and my copper tea glass set is ready to go into the hutch.

If you have pots with copper bottoms on them, a quick way to keep them shiny is to rub them with a lemon piece with a sprinkle of salt on it after every use. Rinse them off after this quick rub down and dry with a towel. Put the lemon piece in the garbage disposal to keep your sink smelling fresh. Don't you just love it when there's a use for everything?