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The Recycle-ista...Adventures in Vintage: How To Clean Dorothy Thorpe Silver Band Glassware: Google and Twitter to the Rescue
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Awhile back I found this little glass and silver piece in one of my vintage hunts. I flipped it over and was pleasantly surprised to find the original Dorothy Thorpe label.
It's always fab to find an original label and especially on glassware. I would have guessed Dorothy on this but there are so many lookalikes and items misattributed as such. Well I ended up hanging on to it for a bit since I couldn't find a DT vase that matched and I really felt like I needed to clean it...
Big chore = procrastination.
Well I decided this was too cool to hang around in my house so I gave it another go recently. I found similar ones this time in my Google search and discovered that it was actually a cordial decanter and it was missing a stopper.
Poop.
Well, ready to salvage whatever value I could out of it, I determined to list it for sale, because there is probably someone out there who has a stopper that will fit....or broke their decanter and needs something to put their stopper in. :)
To help, I decided to spiff it up and make it look its best. The glass was a bit cloudy as well. But I needed to be careful. Hubby is usually better at cleaning silver than I am (more patience) but he was nervous. He said DT was tricky and he had already ruined a couple of pieces. So first I turned to Twitter. Got some suggestions of silver polishing cloths very lightly and using white vinegar and water with rice as an abrasive inside the vase.
I also got this link to a blog article about cleaning glass decanters: How To Clean Glass Decanters I didn't have a silver polishing cloth...so I turned to Google yet again.
This time I found a video that shows using toothpaste.
Well, toothpaste I did have. I used some white vinegar and warm water and rice for the inside (note: rice may not have been the best choice with this shape...they were crazy hard to get out!!) and I lightly polished with toothpaste.
Here's the result:
Better! Not perfect but I was just looking to spiff. The silver has some scratching and the glass is still a bit cloudy...but this is not really a high value item and the time I was spending on it was valuable too. Toothpaste! A surprising but non-toxic answer. And it worked. I just used Crest Complete...a paste, not a gel.
Maybe a kind with baking soda would work even better.
What are your go-to cleaning/polishing products?
PS: You may remember my blogging challenge? Well I gave up. :) I had too many other things to do.
