How to make an item frame in Minecraft

Item frames in Minecraft are a great way to display various items and blocks as decoration. They can even be used to create puzzles and switches for hidden doors. Thanks to their versatility, players tend to craft or collect quite a few item frames during a playthrough. With that in mind, how can players make an item frame, and how can they get one that naturally appears in-game?

Finding and acquiring an item frame in Minecraft is often a bit more difficult than crafting one, but it doesn't hurt to know the process for both just in case. The good news is that crafting item frames is incredibly cheap when it comes to resources. This means players can mass produce as many item frames as they need to set up their decorations or puzzles/door switches as they please.

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How to get or craft an item frame in Minecraft

Crafting an Item Frame

The crafting recipe for an item frame in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

To craft an item frame in Minecraft, you'll need at least eight sticks and one piece of leather. More can be added to the crafting recipe to produce multiple item frames at once.

You can find out how to obtain both materials for the crafting recipe below:

Sticks - Sticks can be crafted by placing two wooden plank blocks of any type vertically on top of each other in a crafting grid, and the same can be performed with two pieces of bamboo if desired. They can also be dropped by breaking dead bushes, fishing, breaking leaf blocks, killing witches, and breaking boats from the following certain heights (12, 13, 49, 51, 111, 114, 198, 202, 310, or 315 blocks).

Additionally, sticks can be looted from bonus chests and trial chamber chests, looted village chests in shops for cartographer, toolsmith, and fletcher villagers, and by brushing desert well suspicious sand blocks.

Leather - A common byproduct of killing various animals in Minecraft, leather can drop from killing cows, donkeys, hoglins, horses, llamas, mooshrooms, and mules. It can also be obtained via fishing and bartering with piglins.

In Java Edition, leather can be acquired when villagers throw it to players if they adventure through a village with the Hero of the Village effect active. It can also be crafted by combining four rabbit hides in a crafting grid.

The materials for crafting item frames in Minecraft should be easy to craft or find (Image via Mojang)

Once you have their sticks and leather, all you need to do to craft an item frame is to open a crafting table. Place the leather in the center slot while placing sticks in every other surrounding slot. You can then remove the item frame from the output slot in the crafting table.

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How to craft glow item frames in Minecraft

Glow item frames require an existing item frame in their crafting recipe (Image via Mojang)

Once you have crafted at least one item frame, you can use it to create a glow item frame for extra decorative flair. This will require glow squid ink in its crafting recipe, which can be obtained by killing glow squids found deep underwater in lakes and oceans.

Players in Education Edition can also craft the ink by combining 1 iron, 1 sulfur, and 4 oxygen elements using the compound creator block.

Either way, you can then open a crafting table and place the glow squid ink in the center-left slot while placing the existing item frame in the center slot. Now, remove the newly made glow item frame from the crafting table's output slot.

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Where to find and loot item frames in Minecraft

Item frames can be obtained in two ways without using crafting in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

If you don't want to craft an item frame in Minecraft, there are two ways to obtain them otherwise.

The simplest method is to trade for one by paying seven emeralds to a cartographer villager who has reached the expert profession level. However, there is a chance that the villager won't offer this particular trade.

The alternative involves entering the End dimension in Minecraft and finding an end city with an end ship docked next to it. In the back of the lower deck of the end ship, you will find an elytra in an item frame. After killing the shulker protecting it, you can break the elytra out of the frame and then break the frame itself to pick it up.

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How to use item frames in Minecraft

Blocks and items placed in item frames can be rotated in Minecraft (Image via Mojang)

Once you have your item frame or glow item frame, there are a few ways to use it. While you have an item frame in your hands, you can right-click (or press the use/place item button on their controller) on the side surface of most solid blocks to hang the frame up. You can also equip a block/item in your hands and right-click or press use/place item on the item frame to place the block/item in the frame.

While a block or item is placed in an item frame, you can right-click or press use/place item on the framed block or item to rotate it. If you don't like how your item frame looks, you can left-click or press the attack/mine button on your controller to break whatever is inside the item frame and the frame itself. It can then be picked up and replaced.