Mounting a Bowdabra Bowmaker to a Board

The Bowdabra is an inexpensive tool for making bows. It's very helpful and really a very simple device.

The image below shows my Bowdabra mounted to a board that my husband made for me.

I've had many questions about the dimensions of the board etc, so here's a short tutorial explaining how we did it. We don't sell the Bowdabra on Trendy Tree anymore, but here's my Amazon link for it: Bowdabra

My husband cut a piece of scrap board that he had in his shop and we just spray painted it white. It's about 1/2" thick (presswood type scrap), 20" in length and 9" in width.

He drilled four small holes in the base of the Bowdabra which is made of plastic.

We didn't know if this would cause the plastic to break or not, but we wanted to try it. The Bowdabra is light and slips around all over the place when not secured in some manner.

He centered the Bowdabra in the middle of the board and used four small wood screws to attach. Be sure to get screws that don't go all the way through the board.

I made the markings on the board using a permanent marker and measured from the center of the Bowdabra where it holds the ribbon and made the first mark 4" to the right of the center and 4" to the left. After that, I made the markings 2" apart.

I would have taken more care with my markings if I had known people would be wanting to know how I made it))))

With this board, you could make bows up to 18" to 20" or so, but that's much larger than the average bow. Mine are usually 10-14"for wreaths.

Of course, you can make bows without using any specific tools other than holding in your hand, or sometimes I use a chip clip!

Here's an example of a bow I just made with the Bowdabra and one hand tied using a chip clip.

But, for me....using the Bowdabra is easier than hand tied unless you are just making a shoestring type bow. I use the Pro Bow to make bows with too)))

Note: Since this post was written, we also have added the EZ Bowmaker to our bow-making tools. The EZ Bowmaker is available on Trendy Tree. (Anytime you see it out of stock, there are always more on the way.)