The authors propose and demonstrate how to use an ordinary optical microscope as a flexible optical lithography tool. Until the advent of digital cameras, most high power optical microscopes had a vertical cone shaped fixture with a Polaroid film holder to record optical micrographs on the film. For conversion to lithography, the Polaroid film holder is simply removed and a vu-graph transparency, which serves as a mask, is substituted in the plane of the film. The transparency has the desired pattern printed on it by a laser printer or a copier. Ideally, the transparency has to be backlighted by a converging light source such that (ignoring diffraction) a pinhole anywhere in the transparency illuminates the entire lens at the base of the cone shaped fixture. The authors used a 11.4 cm diameter, 12.7 cm focal length Fresnel lens and a fiber light to generate the appropriately converging mask illumination. With the highest magnification, 100x lens the image on the mask was demagnified approximately by 700x on the sample. With this lens, the authors could expose lines of slightly less than 1 mu m width. (C) 2007 American Vacuum Society.