Cleaning silver jewellery

I wear a lot of sterling silver jewellery and recently my cleaning cloth just wasn't doing the trick to get my jewellery back to as-new sparkling form. It wasn't just the hard to reach places (e.g between chain links) which was looking dirty, but even the flat surfaces didn't have the same shine that new jewellery has.

So anyway, I went about doing a home concoction cleaning spree of my jewellery! I wish I had taken 'before' shots, not just 'after' shots, but I still have some stuff to clean so maybe next time I'll show the difference.

I used the old bicarb/baking soda trick:
- Take a small bowl and line with aluminium fol
- Add hot water and a tablespoon of baking soda and stir (I used the hotest tap water I could get, but if you want super fast and strong you can boil water in a kettle)
- Place silver jewellery in the solution (on top of the foil) for about one minute
- Rinse clean and let air dry

So as you can see from the shot below - the chain on my bracelet is now sparkling clean! Prior to cleaning, the insides of the chain connections were all tarnished and blackish. When I placed my jewellery in the bowl, I swirled it around a bit to make sure the chemical reactions were cleaning all edges as much as possible and as I did that I could see the black grimey bits swirling around and rising to the surface.

Here's a pic of the bowl after cleaning quite a few different things (necklaces, rings, bracelets). Can you see the black dots?

Actually here's one I do have a before and after shot of. This shot below was taken a few weeks prior to cleaning my jewels.

And then after cleaning - so the lighting isn't quite the same etc but can you see how sparkly they are! Especially the bottom band.

There are also suggestions on websites that if you have a build up of dirt in hard to reach places, just soak your jewellery overnight in a bowl of water with dishwashing liquid but I've never tried this and never really thought it would be anymore effective.

Have you tried either technique with success?