My mom just bought a home that was built in 1847. It has 4 beautiful fireplaces and they have decorative copper frames around the fireplace opening. The only way I know these are copper is because there is the smallest hint of copper shining through 150 years worth of crap. I tried rubbing diluted lemon juice on it but that didn't work. Any suggestions?
Lemon and salt. To clean up the copper item first of all you should wash the copper item to get off any excess dirt. Take a lemon and cut the lemon in half. Pour some salt into a shallow dish. You should pour in enough salt to have a half inch of salt covering the bottom of the dish. Take the lemon half and dip it into the dish of salt so that the cut off end of the lemon is in the salt. After you pull the lemon half back out of the salt take a look to see that the lemon is covered with the salt. Take the salted lemon and rub it onto the copper item. Rub the lemon in tiny circles and you can see it start to work on the tarnish. The lemon should be safely taking away the tarnish. Occasionally dip the lemon into the salt every so often and continue to rub in tiny circles until the spot you are rubbing gets clean. Then move on to another spot and rub the copper item.
