hello and welcome my name is dan havey and i run a website called greedylobster.com in this next series of videos we're going to talk about how to clean wedgewood and also how to repair wedgewood in this video today we're going to talk specifically about how to clean wedgewood bass reliefs which are the white reliefs that are on the side of your standard jasper wear like this one here is your standard blue jasper wear before we get started we want to talk about inspecting the pieces because you never want to put into any kind of water bath of any kind you don't really want to wash too heavily any piece that is cracked that's been repaired has any chips in it has any loose or broken reliefs on it so you want to check over everything really good and let me just show you here i got a really big uh jardin air and i don't know if you're gonna be able to see this in the bottom but yeah i think you can right here this is a starburst crack there's one here there's one here and there's one here if i were to soak this for any period of time in warm water or anything else what will happen is the water gets inside of the cracks and will actually cause them to open up and lengthen and i found that out the hard way when i was cleaning this really nice lilac biscuit barrel had the same thing on here a couple of starbursts i think you can maybe see this there's one there and there's one there and what happened you can see now the starburst runs all the way out to the edge here here here all the way along and it even goes up the side there's one i know you can see but either way it it split all the way out and it really i mean it didn't ruin the piece but it certainly affected the value of it because it just the the little starburst on the value on the bottom isn't going to really affect the value but now that's gone out and cracked up the side it has affected the value so the first thing you want to do with any piece once you're done expect inspecting it and you're sure that it's okay to wash it you just want to give it a bath in some warm soapy water so i just do it right in my kitchen sink warm soapy water put it in there let it set for 10-15 minutes and then i just go at it with a standard old sponge just kind of wash it off i take a take a toothbrush and i just kind of scrub the reliefs and i just i just get it cleaned up and a lot of times that's all you really need a piece like this that's all i needed on here was just to give it a good bath i mean there was really no staining and it was it was ready to go after i gave it a bath but if it's not if the bastard leaves are stained or if the inside of it is stained well then that's what the rest of this video is about so this piece right here is what made me begin to start cleaning my wedgewood when i got this piece it was black it literally looked like it had been on fire and the on the sides of the muses especially you'll see the pictures on my website there'll be a link if you're watching this on youtube there'll be a link below the video but the sides of these ladies here the the muses were just absolutely black as like i said you'll see in the pictures and so i cleaned it a whole bunch of different ways and i'll get into that in a second but one thing i will tell you with a piece that was as dirty as this over time what i have found is that sometimes the black that was in the relief still continues to leach out you can see in here possibly that these tree leaves are getting dark again as well as the top of this muse's head and these leaves as well and although i went through the entire process of cleaning that i'll get into in a minute over time there was so much gunk in the stoneware itself that it leached out through the inside into the inside of the vase and every two or three weeks i had to re-clean the vase and i probably did that over a three-month period until finally was clean but like i said you can see here now that there are a few spots where the dirt is starting to come back out again so what did we do to clean um the jasperware first thing we tried is just common everyday household cleaners toilet cleaners things like clr all that didn't work at all then we tried biz laundry detergent and although that worked here i'll show you the box of it right here although that worked we found very quickly it wasn't really the best method for this now if you're cleaning jardiners that have mineral stains this is a really good product for that but that'll be for a different video so what we finally landed on was and the thing you got to understand we wanted to because we were experimenting we didn't really know what was going to work we didn't know what wasn't going to work and of course i did not want to hurt any of my jasper so we started with the very basic of things and what we came up with was to just take a little bit of baking soda and what i use here is some stuff i had in the refrigerator and what you want to do is go down to i get this at the dollar store just um your basic hydrogen peroxide this is three percent and i mean it's so mild it says right on here you can use it to rinse your teeth with it you could probably drink it but i wouldn't suggest doing that and what we're going to do is we just take a little bit of this and we mix it in with the baking soda okay it looks like i put a little too much in there we need a little more baking soda what we're looking to do is to make a thick paste because what we want to do is to get the hydrogen peroxide to adhere to the side of the vase so we'll just keep mixing it here so you want it to be pretty thick but a little bit runny okay that's good enough so what we're going to do is we're going to take our vase and like i said it's starting to get black on here again so we're just going to test it on here and what we're going to do is we're going to lay it down on a clean cloth and then take some other cloths around it to support it get it good and tight and all you do is you just spoon this over the top and you just let it run down get into all the cracks and crevices and don't worry about the fact that it's running down the side it's not going to hurt anything and you just there you go you just goop it on like that and then what you can do is take a piece of plastic wrap just to help it to keep from drying out too quickly and just put that over the top gently like that and there you go that's all you have to do you let it set for about i would say let it set for at least a day it could be as little as 12 hours depending on how quickly it dries but once it's dried just take the whole thing put it right into a sink full of warm soapy water let it set for just a couple of minutes and the baking soda will dissolve and then you just take a take yourself a little little brush and give it a little quick scrubbing and it should come out fine take a look at it if it's not clean enough do the process all over again you may have to do it half a dozen times to get the result that you really want but after a while i got tired of mixing up the baking soda like this so what we did i just had a flash one day and i said hey instead of putting the baking soda on there why don't we try something different and it became a very simple solution which worked as good if not a lot better because the problem with the baking soda is it kind of diluted the hydrogen peroxide so what you see i did here is i just dumped some hydrogen peroxide into this little bowl and now i'm putting in some cotton balls and so you do the same process you get the cotton balls on there take any old vase i'm just going to grab one here and turn it so it's right side up for you and again this isn't really dirty but i just happen to have this vase here and it's very simple what you do is you get them all good and soaked in and you take that and you just put it over the top you just kind of smoosh it down a little bit just to get good adhesion and again what you want to do here put a piece of plastic wrap over the top let it set for 12 to 24 hours take it off put the put it back in there again into the hydrogen peroxide get it all wet put it back on keep doing that treating that until it is completely clean then again could be could be one treatment could be three weeks worth of treatments depends on how bad your piece was again the piece we started with that the pictures are on the website that literally took months of different things to finally get that properly cleaned and like i said even now today three six months later whatever it's been uh the black is still leeching back out of it so this works really good but then of course the next step became well i don't want to keep doing this cotton ball thing this is really kind of kind of lame and time consuming so what became the next step was we decided to get ourselves some kitchen pots and i'll move this into view here hopefully we can see it and all i simply did is again i just stuck with at this point the three percent hydrogen peroxide put about a gallon or so into the pot and then i just soak the pieces in the pot now after doing this for a while i i bought a book and it's called wedgwood get that in view wedgewood abc but not middle e by harry uh button of the button wedgewood museum and if you flip it open here on page 27 let me put my glasses on so i can read right up here it says stubborn stain may bleach out with long soaking perhaps a week in a warm hydrogen peroxide such treatment will not affect the glaze or the decoration so i knew at that point obviously i was moving in the right direction and i'm glad i was so what we did is uh like i said so you put it in here and you let it soak um again sometimes 12 hours sometimes it could be a couple of weeks in order to be able to soak it enough to be able to get rid of the stains well then what we did because uh oh let me before i go any further um what i do is because this glass the lid on here is glass i put a piece of aluminum foil over the top here it also keeps it a little bit more airtight and i seat that down in there so that it's on there good and tight and so that no sunlight gets in there because it's really important with the hydrogen peroxide to keep the sunlight out especially keep it out of direct sunlight because the sunlight will i guess it makes the hydrogen peroxide loses potency is probably the best way to put that so let me move this to the side because at this point we're still using just the three percent solution and again it was working and the reason why we did it in this process was because again i didn't want to hurt any of uh of my pieces so we just kept experimenting a lot of times with broken pieces or pieces that were so far gone i figured it was it was worth trying so now where we are at is doing this this is a 20 solution that i get down at the beauty supply store and i don't use it at full strength i'm still a little leery on things so what i do is i cut it 50 50 with a gallon of water and what you want to do is use like purified drinking water you don't want to use tap water because especially here in arizona our tap water is really full of a lot of minerals there's also chlorine and fluoride in the water and you just don't want that in with your with your your jasper because you don't know how it's going to affect it and with the minerals in our water here the minerals may just leach right into the stoneware and i'm trying to get the minerals back out of the stoneware so that's what we do here you just um one gallon of water one gallon of this breaks it down so it's only a ten percent solution and what i've really gone to now because as you saw with the pot that i have the pieces are sticking out of the top of the solution and so what we're going with now is um this is this is not it i just want to show you this one again this is a different pot you can see here this jug is sticking out of the water well i got to turn it over and turn it over and that's really pain in the in the rear end so what i've gone to now is a 5 gallon bucket which there's no way i'm going to be able to get it into view on the camera so just trust me i use a 5 gallon bucket with a 10 solution and i put in the liquid high enough to be able to cover any tall pieces that i want to set down inside of it so as i mentioned in the beginning not only is the hydrogen peroxide good for cleaning off the reliefs it's also good for cleaning out the inside if you have a lot of stain on the inside of any of your pieces this one this one has a glaze on the inside and on the website there will be before and after pictures this is the after as you can see it's pretty clean there's a little bit of staining down here which you may not be able to see but this was pretty bad beforehand and this soaked for probably about a month i think in the three percent solution so if you went with a ten percent solution probably clean up a little bit faster now here is the top of a sugar bowl and you can see that there are still stains in the bottom but they're not nearly as dark as they had been and again they'll be before and after pictures on the website so again if you're watching this on youtube there'll be a link below the video that'll give you access to the website so you can go there read a little bit more information about it and also see a lot more of the before and after pictures so i'd like to thank you for watching and have a great day