Theo my son loves Thomas the Tank Engine but for carnival party 2008 at his school he wanted to be Percy the tank engine! I surfed a lot on the web collecting many ideas on your website (many thanks!). I used approximately the same method you already described to make a Thomas the train Halloween costume taking a large card box and a smaller black one but I modified the shape.
I completely opened the large box and cut it into tank engine shape. I tried to match the shape of an officially licensed Thomas the Tank Engine foam costume I found a picture on eBay.
To glue back my tank engine I used glue gun. I did not paint my tank engine but covered it with green paper tablecloth. The red line is a red paper strand. The buffers were cut in black card and glued. The small green wheels are plastic caps of Ducros herbs and spices boxes. The smoke stack is a plastic tube covered with black card. The head-portion of the train is an empty Haribo sweets plastic box and surrounded with black card.
For the face I printed up a Percy face template. For Percy’s #6 I just printed up a Word art red and yellow Arial size 36 enlarged number, cut it out and glued it on. As showed on the picture I attached the tank engine to my son much like the photos already featured on your page using straps of two different travel bags. As they had big plastic spring hooks at their ends I did small hole on the box to attached them. It took me about seven hours to make this Percy the train costume. It was worth to see my son’s face and was a huge hit (even his little brother Robin aged of two loved it!)
Total Spent: $10
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I LOVE this costume and my little boy soooo wants to be Percy. But after looking the the picture my boys asked why James was green??? silly kids. I went to the web site and sure enough- the “Percy” picture is actually James.
Does anyone know where I can get a real Percy picture?