As Jane posted earlier in the month, the BeadStyle staff is doing a six-week jewelry course with some middle-school students. For my class next Monday, I will be teaching the girls how to make chain-mail locket bracelets.

Since we only have an hour to teach our project, I found premade chain-mail bracelets at a very reasonable price. However, when the bracelets arrived, I was less than thrilled with the quality. Not that I was expecting anything top-notch; I could handle the fact that many of the jump rings hadn't been closed correctly. I was more shocked by the state of the metal — several of the bracelets were badly tarnished, and a few of them were even rusty.

Being short on time, I didn't have the luxury of returning the bracelets and starting from scratch, so instead I set out to find my own solution (or, to be more accurate, test other people's solutions).

For round one, I tried the ultrasonic jewelry cleaner that lives with the Art Jewelry staff. I did a round in the ultrasonic cleaner, I brushed them with soapy water, and I did another round in the ultrasonic cleaner. This worked fairly well for about half of the bracelets.

Round two: I tried the baking soda and aluminum foil trick. This worked fairly well. I learned that it's best to throw the metal in there as soon as the baking soda hits the water. (On the first try I mixed the baking soda with the water before I put it the water glass pan, and I didn't see any noticeable difference in the bracelets.) I was fairly impressed with the results, but I ran out of baking soda.

Round three: Since I had been doing my baking soda experiment at the kitchen station here at work, many people stopped by to share their own solutions, one of which was cola. When I ran out of baking soda, I ran to the neartest store to buy more, but they were out of baking soda, too. So, I decided to try cola. And I have to say, I am thoroughly impressed. Somebody (again at the kitchen station) told me you're supposed to use aluminum foil with the cola, which I didn't do, but it still worked really well. I let the bracelets soak in there for a minute or so (you can see the bubbles attach to the metal), and then I scrubbed them with the toothbrush again and dried them very well. I now have shiny, rust-free bracelets to use for my class on Monday.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I don't run very effective experiments. Instead of only testing one thing at a time, I usually get too excited and try several things at once. And the baking soda trick is supposed to work based on a chemical reaction between the aluminum, the baking soda, and the jewelry, but since the bracelets were about a dollar a piece, I have no clue what metal they're made of. For all I know, the chemical reaction won't work with their type of metal. Yet in spite of my lack of scientific forethought, tenacity got me where I needed to go. I don't know if my success is the result of round one, round two, round three or a combination of all three rounds, but I have my nice shiny bracelets.

Do you have any homemade jewelry solutions? I'd love to hear about them. You never know when the next jewelry emergency is going to be around the corner. . .