boiling clothes

i cooked mum's clothes over the last 2 days.

had been wanting to do this for a long while to get rid of all the stains around the neck areas of her clothes. you see, mum has the habit of applying thick dollops of petroleum-based ointment on herself a few times each day, especially the areas around her chest, her neck and her nape. and in the process, she invariably ended up with having the neck areas of all her clothes stained with the petroleum base. worst of all, there was no way to get rid of these petroleum base if we were to wash the clothes normally. as a result, her clothes all looked very dirty. 

logic tells me that i need to use either some organic solvents or heat to get rid of these stains. and thus far, i have tried using turpentine and thinner, mixed with more soap powder, more "powderful" soap powder, bleach, etc but to no avail. all i ended up with was thickened gooey substances that continued to stick to the clothes. i ended up throwing away some of her clothes becos of these stains. and yesterday, with the maid on her off, i decided to try an experiment. i boiled one of her t-shirt and it worked well. to enhance the outcome, i added soap powder too and it worked. not only did i managed to get rid of the petroleum base, i managed to also brighten some of the colours too!  and today, i decided to repeat the process with many other t-shirts of hers. so... yes, i cooked mum's clothes these 2 days!

haha...

point to note: this method works with clothes that are made of natural materials such as cotton or linen. i am not sure about whether it works with delicates (e.g. silk) or clothes with high synthetic content (e.g., rayon). you might just end up destroying the clothes if you boil them...