We have a three year old!!
I love balloon arches and garland. That is no secret, but it was really cool to extend my design skills even just ever so slightly. Plus my son has been talking about having a Train party for a month leading up to this. Of course I needed to go crazy.
With all balloon projects, I have to work the day before blowing them up, and in secret because my son will steal them all.
P.S. if you have yet to get one of these, you need to. There is no way I would do this all with my lungs.
The train was made from cardboard, and that took about a week. I wanted to make a different type of train at first. More of a cutout of the front profile of a train for a photo booth look. But I happened to have a TON of giant boxes from another project kicking around. So there I was with a giant low effort train (that also took up the entire living room).
Building the train took almost no effort because it was fashioned together with just two large boxes that were magically perfect. But I did need to cut out windows and cut some tires and the stack up front.
Painting this was the more time consuming part. Every paint coat to dry before adding another, so it took a few days of waiting.
Assembling was easy in this specific location because of the large decorative tree. We used wired to attach in the middle of the branches and then tapped it to the train’s stack. It took maybe thirty minutes to set up which is crazy short for my usual balloon setups. Typically the hardest part is fixing the garland to the ceiling to wall. and finding a way to do that takes time.
And the final product was a fun addition to a few other decorations. I love working with balloons. I really liked this look of the balloons looking like steam coming from the train. Plus the cardboard train was accessible to climb inside. It was turned it into a fort in no time.
For something last minute I think this came out to be a fun little backdrop. I would love to remake this with more time to bend cardboard to make a more smooth realistic train look. But hey, it was for a 3 year old and it needed to be part décor and part disposable toy.