A long time ago, the Syracuse University Science Fiction club published a little magazine every year. This is the sort of thing artsy student organizations are required to do if they want to exist next year.

When I joined the club, this was a 5 page, purple ditto, stapled in the corner. The printing was so poor you could hardly read the stories, which was widely acknowledged to be a blessing.

Over the years, we learned more about reproduction (ahem) and even a little about writing. By the time I graduated, the 'zine was a digest sized chap-book, offset printed with nice looking artwork, courtesy of two students who would soon be professional artists.

We printed one of my stories, and my friendly native artist did a nice pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate it.

I ended up with the 8x10 drawing, matted in black cardboard. I think I may have paid him $5.00 for it - mostly to cover the cost of the matte-board.

Some 50 years later, the adhesive has given way and the art slipped out of the matte.

Now, I could just find some scotch tape and put it back together, but I'm afraid the cardboard frame has seen better days, and besides, I've got these short elm boards that I milled from one of my dead elm trees. Elm is a pretty wood with nice grain and short pieces of wood are just perfect for a picture frame.

This was the plan.

I wanted a small, un-obtrusive frame for the art, not something big and ornate that would overshadow it.

So I cut the wood about 1/4 inch thick and 1/2 inch wide.

Gluing such small pieces of wood is different than gluing a cabinet or bookshelf constructed from 3/4 inch wood. The little pieces flick over and reach for the sky when you try to attach a normal gluing clamp.

Even my strips of bicycle inner tube didn't work.

After several attempts, I cut angled corner braces and glued the frame to those. My glue clamps were quite happy to hold those together. Once the glue dried, I trimmed the braces to about 1/16 inch thick and sanded them to shallow pyramids.

The frame looks nice, and the artwork is now on my bedroom wall, reminding me of good times a long time ago.