Life is cruel enough without hardward stores...

The IRS took pity on me and refunded some of my own $$$.  Very big of them, since I have these piles and piles of pastel paintings, just yearning for frames.  Now, I have mastered the art of centering and securing the painting on its backboard and matting it without getting fingerprints on the mat (most of the time, if anyone knows how to get pastel pigment off white mats, let me know).  I have learned to very carefully Windex the glass and blow out any tiny morsels of detritus before slamming the whole thing into the frame, only to find I had forgotten to sign my work  Aaaarrrrgggghh!  But, except for the metal frames that come with handy doohickies that have holes for the wire, I have not come up with a way to secure the hanging wire to the wooden frames without resorting to my faithful staple gun, which I braved the hardware store to purchase so I could stretch the one canvas teacher made us do (and that, too, required more than one trip), and my friend and mentor, the PROFESSIONAL artist says that is tacky.  Eye screws are de riguer.  No way I could get these microscopic little screws into the miniscule lip of the very hard wooden frame.  Soooooo frustrating.  Then my admittedly fertile mind had one of its AHA moments.  What I need is a tiny drill!  So I packed up one of my already framed paintings with its little packet of accoutrements (eye screws and picture wire) and bounced off to OSH yesterday afternoon.  One of the things I know how to do well is look helpless and confused.  Half an hour, three hardware experts, and $50 later, I had this handy-dandy drill, with an auxlliary collet to hold the 1/16" bit.  It was just like the staple gun; there is more than one size of staples and there is more than one size of collar to hold the infinite number of bits and doodads you can attach to a drill.  Thank you, dear OSH folks.  I attached a couple of wires last night to pieces that were already framed and the drill was slick as a whistle.  Framing will never be my favorite pastime, but it is no longer the enigma it once was.  Now, off for more eye screws, wire, and oh, yeah, frames.