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A couple of months ago, I was nursing my baby when I heard the clatter of over a hundred coffee stirrers hit the ground. Our hall closet turned pantry is always an overstuffed mess and my husband had knocked off our package of coffee stirrers. I didn’t want to just throw them away, but I definitely wasn’t going to take the effort to wash them all either. Instead, I decided I would reuse them in a craft for my 2 1/2 year old daughter. She has recently loved trains (check out this free train sticker chart printable) and so I decided to make a train craft.
My toddler has a fun Little People train (get newer version here) that I decided needed coffee stirrer train tracks. What is so much fun about this train craft is that you can make your tracks the right size for your kid’s favorite train toy. If you are handy with wood, you could even carve your child a train to use on your tracks.
How to Make Tracks for a Train Craft
Supplies:
Creating:
Glue together coffee stirrers with hot glue. That’s it, you’re done. Just kidding. While that is technically all there is to it, I will walk you through the steps I took.
First, I took 8 coffee stirrers and hot glued them together end to end to make a circle. This was a major test of my patience, since I had to wait for the glue to set on each pair before moving on. If you haven’t used a hot glue gun before, check out these tips. Some coffee stirrers glued better than others, but it just needs to be a rough circle by the end. This circle will become the inner circle of the train tracks.
Next, I did the same thing with 10 coffee stirrers, except I kept them as a long line instead of forming them into a circle. This will become the outer track circle. I left it open since I didn’t know exactly how long it needed to be.
Then, it was time to add the tracks. I put my daughter’s train on top of one of the stirrers and saw that it was the width of half a stirrer. So, I cut a whole bunch of coffee stirrers in half. Next, I glued each one approximately the same distance apart onto my inner circle. I glued them sticking out, perpendicular to the circle. This also took a while, but I could at least kinda lay them there to finish drying instead of holding them the entire time. I ended up using 44 tracks (22 coffee stirrers).
Lastly, I added the outside circle onto the tracks. I started by gluing a sticking out track onto one end of my long coffee stirrer line. Then I wrapped the long stirrer line around and glued it to about every 6th track. I added to the end as needed, until I had wrapped it around the whole track. It ended up being 11 1/4 stirrers long. Then, I went back and glued all the tracks onto the outside circle that I had initially skipped over.
Reception of Train Craft:
My daughter thought these train tracks were a very fun toy. After finding people (and a gorilla) to ride the train, she took it on it’s maiden voyage around the tracks. She only stopped when I took it away to save it from the baby’s destructive path.
I hope your train loving tot enjoys this train craft as well! Even after making this for my daughter, I still have more leftover coffee stirrers. Do you have any ideas on how to use them up?
Great way to reuse these. Such a fun and easy craft!
Thanks!