Paper Train

I didn't have much money, but I thought using a train was a cute idea for a boys birthday, so I decided to make a train out of construction paper as a decoration for my son's 1st birthday.

Each train car displays photos from each month of my sons 1st year. I just had 4x6's printed off at Walmart, which, last I checked, a 4x6 at Walmart only costs $.09, there are 2 photos per car (1 on each side) so I had to have 24 photos printed. Still, pretty cheap!

The engine I designed from this website: http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/family/paper-trains.htm , you can download the main train engine pattern from there. 

The cars of the train I had to create myself. I just designed boxes somewhat like this: http://www.schoolcentre.com.au/resource/315-making-paper-box-0 , but I used a 4x6 photo to trace the sides of the boxes, and since the 4x6 sides use a lot of paper space the center of the box must be thinner, and there wasn't any space left for the bottom of the box either, so the bottom of the box I made was just some extra scrap paper I glued on, pretty much to so it would have a bottom, but I don't think it was important. 

For the wheels I used a lid to trace circles on white construction paper (the same lids that I used for the train engine), Now comes the tricky part, since construction paper alone wont hold up the boxes I had to cut strips of cardboard and glue them to the underside of the boxes, behind where the wheels will be, so that the wheels can hide the cardboard.(you can see the cardboard strips in the photo above)

After attaching the cardboard I'd have to stand the boxes up to make sure they weren't wobbly, it they were I'd just trim some of the cardboard until they stood well. Then I glued the photos onto the cars,1 photo on each side of the car.

On the top of the car I used a marker and wrote my baby's age (newborn, 1 month, 2 month, etc...) you can see the writing on the photo below, unfortunately I didn't have a stencil so I ended up just doing it freehand.

And finally the last thing I did was attach the wheels. Since I didn't want glue on the face of my photos, I just used tape and just put them over the cardboard strips. 

So that's how I made my paper train! I'm sorry that I didn't take any pictures of the process, but I didn't think I was going to be posting this at the time. I only decided to post it due to my sister's suggestion, I hope you like it!  I liked mine so much in fact that I still have it up :)