A quick extra piece of information for you all, so you may recall that I had a completed holly leaf necklace that I had made, well as it turns out it's probably a good idea to give away your first pieces and so on as presents to people because it lets you know how to deal with any problems that they end up causing. The person I gave it to had gone into a Jacuzzi at some point while they were wearing it and this is a prime example of why it can be absolutely idiotic to wear your jewellery with you everywhere because people forget it's not just any regular metal it's silver you're dealing with so it can actually react very differently compared to other types of Jewellery especially the cheap ones that are just made out of plastic or leather and so on.
As it turns out, the Jacuzzi had some kind of cleaning chemicals in it, which pretty much act almost as a bleach would, thankfully we were pretty lucky with this and my teacher showed me how to fix it. We used a liquid called silver dip to help clean the muck off just by as you can probably guess from the name dipping the silver in and then to clean up the bamboo we just used some Vaseline, unfortunately, the necklace chain was too dulled to use but luckily I have some spare so it's just a matter of giving a replacement.
So, if you're planning on taking your jewellery swimming don't, no Jacuzzi, no swimming pools or anything that has strange chemicals in it otherwise the above photograph is what will happen. We managed to get it mostly fixed though but let this be a warning to people who buy jewellery what happens if you're careless. I wouldn't even necessarily recommend taking it into the shower or bath just on the basis that you don't really know how the silver will react to the chemicals you're using, if you want to clean it normally just use a toothbrush and washing up liquid and give it a gentle scrub.
Good idea giving a few out as a control test. You never know what will happen!
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@shayne
lol in truth it was a bit of an accident at first because I was giving them away as presents to family members anyway but it turned out to be a good idea in the end to test my products so it's something to bear in mind if anyone else is thinking of making stuff themselves to sell to the public.
Beautiful jewelry! Does it matter what type of silver? I only buy sterling silver (when I get silver), and I don't bathe with it - my jewelry is last on and first off when coming or going. Just curious, though, about sterling?? (P.S. Very first piece seen here - where would I vote for you? In initial (by 12 hours ago) or elsewhere?)
So from what I know, the only real difference between sterling silver and fine silver is the purity, they mix metals in to give it strength, so in theory, if you have different metals mixed in with your silver they could react differently to cleaning chemicals and so on even more so than here, it just depends on what the silver refiners have done to the metal.
That could all be down to chance though whether it affects it or not too, so really I would just recommend prevention to be on the safe side. The idea is you simply don't want any weird chemicals coming into contact with the silver otherwise it either oxidises as I showed in the first photograph or does something even worse.
People forget that what they're buying is a genuine silver so the last thing you want is to dip it in something weird and then have it shrink or react oddly to what you're doing. One thing I would say though with fine silver in particular is it is a lot softer and I mean really soft compared to sterling and you could easily just end up crushing or squashing it if you're not careful.