Airplane Toilet Paper Tube Craft

If you’re like me, you love crafts that you can do with your kids without having to run to the store and buy a bunch of supplies. And what’s something you usually (hopefully) have access to? Toilet paper!

Today we’re showing you something fun you can do with those leftover toilet paper tubes with this Airplane Toilet Paper Tube Craft! This is the third in our series of toilet paper tube crafts (links to the others will be at the bottom of this article.) This craft is fun and easy enough for all ages to participate in making! Enjoy!

Supplies:

To make this cute airplane, you’ll need just a few things that you probably already have at home.

1 clean cardboard toilet paper tube (per project)
Glue
Scissors
1 black chenille stem
Printable Airplane templates
White, black, and other colored paper
Clear tape

How to Make it:

The first thing you’ll do when making this craft is go ahead and grab the templates (using the link found at the bottom of this article). Next, you’ll use the templates to cut out the shapes that you need to make this plane from the colored construction paper—just cut the shapes out, trace them onto the paper, and cut those out too. We chose green for this airplane, but you could obviously choose any color you like. Make it green, blue, or pink and sparkly! Or make it a combination of colors. Get creative!

If you are frequent crafter with a cutting device to prove it (such as Cricut Explore), you can use that machine to do the cutting and tracing for you. Just upload the PNG images on the template to your machine software and size the images as follows:

Black pieces = 3 inches wide
White pieces = 2 inches wide
Colored wings = 5 inches wide
Colored wings (resized for the tail pieces) = 2 inches wide

After you’ve cut out the more detailed shapes using the templates, you’ll also cut out a rectangular shape of construction paper to cover the toilet paper tube. It should be whatever color you want your plane to be and will probably need to be about 4 x 6 inches. Once you’ve cut it out, apply some glue to the tube and and carefully wrap the paper around it.

Next, make the tail of the plane by arranging the two rectangular strips into a cross shape and gluing them together.

Use the same method to make a small propeller for the front of the plane, like this:

You’ll glue these pieces to each end of the tube: the propeller will cover the front end of the tube and the tail will come out of the back. You’ll also glue the two pieces for the wings, angled to go across the top and bottom of the tube.

Next you’ll make the wheels of the plane by simply gluing the small white circles to the larger, black circles and allowing them them dry.

Once the wheels are dry, you are going to give them landing gear to attach to by way of the chenille pipe! This gives this craft airplane the cool feature of being able to stand on its own. Bend the chenille stem in half, leaving just a little bit of flat space that you can attach to the body of the plane.

You’ll also bend the ends upward to give it better stability.

Before you glue the chenille stem to the plane, secure the wheels onto the bent up ends using clear tape or glue.

Then use a piece of glue to attach the landing gear to the bottom of the plane.

After everything dries, your Toilet Paper Tube Aircraft is ready to play with, display, or decorate further! There are a lot of ways each child making this craft can customize it to fit his or her own personality: you could use stamps to represent all the places your play airplane has traveled, stick on jewels, or even gently create designs on it with some paint or markers. We hope you have fun with this cute and easy airplane craft, and be sure to check out our other toilet paper tube crafts, too; they all have very similar supply lists!