For our upcoming production of Snow Queen at Triad Stage, I am building some super-awesome puppet animals. But you won’t see those until December. Instead, I will show you a stove leg I had to replace. See, the show needs a wood-burning stove, and we had a great one in stock, but one of the legs was broke and another was missing. I could have molded and cast some new ones, or sculpted a new one out of wood, but I needed a ten-minute solution that did not cost anything.
Luckily for me, I had ordered several sheets of Wonderflex for the aforementioned puppets. I figured I could just use a few of the scraps to make myself some new legs.
Wonderflex gets sticky when hot, and I did not want it sticking to the leg, so I wrapped the leg in aluminum foil (not pictured here). Next, I heated the Wonderflex and essentially draped it over one of the legs. I worked it tight against the surface using my hands, and really dug in along the sides to pick up the raised-edge detail in the original. I wrapped the remainder around the back. Once it had cooled a bit, I carefully pried it apart and pulled the original leg out, than let the Wonderflex finish cooling until it was hard again. I was able to peel most of the aluminum foil off the back of the Wonderflex (the back had picked up the texture of the foil, but it did not show through on the front).
I trimmed the excess material around the edges, leaving some extra on the top. I placed the leg in place and heated up this extra top material and shaped it to fit the underside of the stove. Once cool, I added a bolt to hold it in place.
Finally, I painted it. I started with a flat black spray paint, then dry-brushed some rust color and some grey. You can barely tell which leg is real and which is fake in the photograph above. Plus, the whole process was less than ten minutes of total work time, in between other tasks on the show. The end with the fake legs does have a block of wood underneath to hold it up; the Wonderflex is nowhere near sturdy enough to support a cast-iron stove on its own.
