Removing Engravings from Wedding Cake Knife & Server

Currently I'm in the midst of planning a wedding.  And my parents have told us "we paid for the first one, this time you are on your own!"  And I don't blame them.  So the wedding is going to be almost entirely DIY and simple since I'm working with an EXTREMELY limited budget.  Even though it will be simple, I still want to be able to do many of the traditional things.  And having a cake and doing the whole "cake cutting" thing is on that list.  BUT there was no way I was going to go out and buy a new cake knife and server set.  Last time I had an engraved set made.  They were nothing fancy, but I still was NOT about to spend even $20 to get a new engraved set.  My fiance also had a set from a previous marriage and they were beautiful.  However, they were also engraved.  So we had two sets of servers and knives and both were completely useless.  The set he had was made of stainless steel from a popular personalization place, which we will call "Stuff Forgotten" as my significant other likes to call it.  We did check with "Stuff Forgotten" to see if there was anything they could do to change the engraving, but as expected, they could not. He doesn't even remember the cake cutting part of his first wedding, so it didn't bother me at all to consider using them if we could fix them.  Since we had nothing to lose, I decided to try to remove the engraving myself!  We stopped at Menards and picked up some sandpaper.  I already had some metal surface sand paper at home that had a coarse, medium and fine grit paper included.

I wish I'd taken better pictures before I started and along the process, but I didn't have a blog or a post about it in mind before I started.  Nor did I know if this was even going to work!

 The knife had their initials on it and the server had their names and the wedding date.  I took a piece of the "coarse" sandpaper, wrapped it around a block of wood and started working on it.  I made sure to only sand in one direction because I knew I would like to leave it with a matte or "brushed" type finish.  It took a lot of elbow grease, but after some effort, the letters were finally gone.  For a time you could still see the engraving even though it felt pretty smooth and could not feel the engraving anymore.  I just kept working at sanding it.  Then to smooth it out a bit I used the "fine" grit and then the 400 grit paper dipped in just a small amount of water.  I decided I liked the finish as it was at this point and left it alone.

 And now we have a beautiful cake service set to use for the wedding!  I'm so excited about how they turned out.  One more wedding item done and it only cost $5 to do and I have plenty of sandpaper left for future projects!

*Disclaimer:  I cannot guarantee this will work for you or not ruin the engraved item.  But if it is something you have nothing to lose over, give it a shot.