Tissue Box Train Tutorial

I had a lot of fun making this tissue box train craft for my son. The tissues look like steam coming out of the funnel and it can even be refilled!

Tissue Box Train Tutorial

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My first challenge with this tissue box train was to make it useable for tissues AND refillable. I traced around two square tissue boxes, and glued together four pieces of green card to form a band around them.

I made a train roof from another piece of green card, and cut a hole in it with a craft knife for a cylinder of black card. The cylinder represents the funnel and also where the tissues will be pulled from.

I attached the cylinder to the roof by cutting slits up the sides, spreading them out and gluing them to the inside of the roof.

Then I glued the roof to the base of the train.

I glued the empty box to the non-funnel side of the base, and left the other full tissue box loose so that it can be removed and replaced.

At this point you should probably stick a face on the front and call it finished. But when I was trying to find a “Percy face” to print out, I thought of all the other features it should have. So I accidentally made a driver’s cab.

And then I, um, added a whole bunch of other details! I found the face image at Totally Thomas.

At this point I had to decide about wheels. Whether to add them at all and if so, whether they would be flush with the base of the train (would look odd but better for stability) or to raise the train base up onto the wheels (more realistic but would the unglued tissue box fall out?). I decided to go for realistic! I made then from green card glued onto much thicker card from a packaging box.

Unsurprisingly, F loved it!

And yes, the full tissue box does drop down every now and then, but I could probably rig something underneath it so it stayed up. The tissue box train is currently residing on top of the train table tent!

This craft is part of our transport unit All Things Train.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give a quick shout out to my friend Jessica over at the blog Play Trains who has published her first book! “Old Track New Tricks” is a super cute story about wooden tracks that do tricks to show kids what they can do! A wonderful story and lots of great activity ideas, too.