Cleaning Copper Naturally
A few months ago some of our good friends were having a clear out and asked if we wanted a few things, amongst the items offered was a set of three beautiful copper colanders and I absolutely couldn’t resist so said yes please. I love them so much and they now hang in my kitchen and make me happy every day. As if this secondhand story couldn’t get any better, it turns out that before our friends had them they belonged to her Mama! I do love it when you can track back who has loved an item before you acquire it.
The colanders themselves needed a bit of a clean up so I did some research and if you don’t want to use lots of strong, harsh chemicals then the simple solution seemed to be to use salt and an acid. Our first attempt was to try salting half of a lemon and scrub the colander (I say our, Paul did all the work) but after about 10 minutes of hard scrubbing, it had only made a small improvement – if you know me you know I can be rather impatient and while it was working, it was going to take a really long time and a lot of lemons to clean all three colanders.
Luckily my second attempt only took a few minutes per colander. To clean your copper you will need;
- Salt
- Vinegar (I used white wine vinegar as I had a lot of it for making cleaning products)
- Scrubber
You will need to do this over a sink;
- Pour vinegar over the colander.
- Sprinkle salt liberally onto the colander and vinegar.
- Pour vinegar onto your scrubber.
- Scrub the colander until it is clean and then rinse it well with hot water.
It really is that simple – it was like magic! It took me about two minutes per colander and as you can see from the photos, it makes a big difference. Seeing the refreshed colander hanging next to the two uncleaned ones really did make me smile.
If you are a fellow copper lover or if you give this a try please do leave a comment letting us know if it worked for you.
Livvy and Summer
