About a month ago, my mom and I went to go check out a new Thrift store in town. In a junk bin of miscellaneous jewelry parts, I found half of an old, fake watch. It was terribly dirty–black even. But it was interesting non-the-less. I asked if I could have it for 50 cents (normally items in that bin are $1) because it was only half of the item, and I couldn’t find the back. They said no, all items are as-is. Well I kind-of wanted this weird little clock, but I didn’t want to pay for a half that I wasn’t getting, so I continued to push around pieces until I found what looked like the backing to this watch. And, yay! The piece fit together. So I invested a dollar in this grimy little piece of garbage, and took it home to see if it couldn’t be fixed up.
I looked on the internet for how to clean fake gold, and found great advice from a video on Youtube, the URL for which is buried somewhere on my Twitter feed. The video said to scrub scrub scrub the item with toothpaste, rinse and repeat. So I tried it, and it seemed to be working! I had to really lather the toothpaste on heavy, and I had to reapply it three times, but I could definitely see it working. After a good scrubbing, I took off the face of the clock (which is just a piece of shiny plastic) to remove the old glue with some nail-polish remover. Then I laid the face back on with some superglue.
Next, I needed a string for it, fortunately, I was able to find a black necklace cord on ebay for $0.01, free shipping. That’s right, I put together this necklace for $1.01 (not including taxt). Thank you China. I think it came out really cute.
