We love floss at Pike Lake Dental Center. What dental office doesn’t? Flossing your teeth daily is extremely important to your overall oral health, but did you know we use floss within our office for many things other than simply flossing our teeth? Let me tell you about some of them.
You can cut a cake with dental floss! We received this beautiful cake from Arrowhead Orthodontics this winter and Nancy, one of our dental assistants, cut the cake with dental floss. She wound the floss around her fingers as if she were going to floss her teeth, then gently sliced through the cake. It worked really well and was fun to try. You can’t use this trick on a cake in a pan, but it works great for layered cakes like this. This floss hack works fantastic with soft cheeses too.
Our tree outside was leaning and needed a little encouragement to help it grow straight. We cut a long piece of floss and attached one end to a ground stake and the other end loosely to the tree. The leaning tree is growing straight and tall now. The floss has held strong outside in the elements for a couple months already. We like to think of it as a little ortho for the tree!
Leaning houseplants are never nice to look at. We have bolstered many, many indoor plants here at Pike Lake Dental Center with dental floss. The floss holds tight, while still allowing the plant to grow. Plus, it’s easily adjustable when tied in a bow. We do find the unwaxed floss is a little easier to adjust when needed.
Hanging pictures can be an ordeal. You want to hang each piece absolutely straight, but sometimes putting more than one hole in the wall is not what you want to do. With this particular picture, we tied a short string of dental floss to both hangers and created one adjustable hanger. This trick has worked really well with this picture. Plus, we only needed to put one hole in the wall, instead of two. Win and win! Again, unwaxed dental floss is best with pictures, because the knots don’t slide as easily over time.
Dental floss can help remove stubborn rings. I tucked one end of about a 24” piece of unwaxed dental floss under my ring, then I carefully wrapped the floss down the length of my finger. I gently pulled on the end of the floss nearest my ring and it pulled the ring right off my finger. Genius! By wrapping the floss around my finger, the circumference of my finger was reduced. With a smaller finger circumference, it was much simpler to ease the ring off my finger. I tried the trick with both waxed and unwaxed floss and it’s a much cleaner process with unwaxed floss. The wax from the floss was a little challenging to remove from both my skin and my ring after the experiment. Obviously, don’t keep the floss wrapped around your finger any longer than you absolutely need to. You don’t want to block the circulation for long.
Lost the screw to your glasses and need a quick fix? Look no further than your dental floss. Simply line up the holes where the screw is missing and tie a piece of dental floss through the hole. It works great for a quick fix or, possibly, a more lengthy fix until you can remember to get a new screw.
Remember Dr. Matt’s fish-hook-in-the-finger story from last summer? We use a piece of dental floss to hang his “lucky” lure in his office so he will always remember to use pliers when removing hooks while fishing.
We, of course, want you to floss your teeth at least once every day, but now you may have some additional uses for your dental floss. If you run out of floss, stop by our office for another spool. We are happy to help encourage flossing! And maybe help inspire a few DIY projects along the way. Happy flossing, everybody!
Written and submitted by Stephanie Jugovich, staff member at Pike Lake Dental Center