There are some jobs that the whole point of the embrodiery is to make it look ancient or to replace a damaged piece on an exisiting old garment, in these cases having a shiny new piece of goldwork in there would really stand out and not look right. Luckily there are ways of aging goldwork quickly to cheat the time and achieve the look necessary. Here we have our newly finished silver coloured goldwork cuffs.

The whole process centers around a very common kitchen ingredient, eggs.

Once hard boiled and shelled the eggs are sealed in with the embroidery and allowed to sit for a short time.

Here you can see the warmth from the eggs creating steam which carries the sulphur released from them to the goldwork.

This eats away at the finish, giving it an aged, tarnished look, depending on how much you want to exaggerate this will depend on how long you leave it in there for and if you need to smash the eggs to release more.  

The above piece is the cuff before the antiquing process and below is after, you can see the difference between the two, now just to do the other one to match!