Now that people on basic accounts start SL with no money at all, I have taken to showing them how to make their own picture frame. Although it is a fairly simple task, I find that many people use two or more prims for a picture frame, even when they are on first land of 512 square metres, and have only 117 prims -- or basic building blocks -- to use for a whole house and contents.

Picture frames can be used for SL photographs, for textures and pictures that you upload, and for texture or pictures that you are given in world. Many of the places which carry free stuff also carry textures which can be used for the frame or for the picture within.

Here's how to make your own frame. First, find somewhere where it is all right for you to build. This means a sandbox or your own land, basically, although most people don't mind people building as long as they clear up after themselves.You need to start with making a cube: which means right clicking on the ground (or Apple clicking if you're a Mac user) and choosing "create" on the pie menu which appears.

You then need to left click on the ground, and should find that a cube appears. Right click the cube and choose "edit" to make changes to the cube. In order to turn a cube into a frame, you need to taper the edges of the cube and to flatten it. You do this by selecting the object tab across the middle of the edit menu -- if you can't see the object tab, click more to drop down the lower half of the edit menu.

The object page is full of numbers and settings - you can ignore these, in the main. Go to the taper boxes and put in 0.25 into both the X and the Y setting. Then choose stretch in the top left hand section of the edit menu and immediately coloured boxes appear over your cube. If coloured boxes don't appear, you may have dropped your object, so right click the object, choose "edit" and then choose stretch in the top left hand section of the edit window.

Grab the upper blue box by left clicking it and dragging it down, and you will see your frame flatten. If you go too far, it is easy to grab it and lift it up again. When you have the depth of the frame right, you can change the proportions too by grabbing the red or green boxes.

You can stick with the default wood texture, or if you have a texture you would like to replace it with, can retexture the frame. To texture the frame, right click and choose "edit" then click the texture tab along the middle of the edit window. Click on the texture box, which shows the default texture at the moment, and then choose the texture you want to use from the texture picker which will open. Select the texture you want to use from the folders which appear, and then click select. You should see the prim change colour to the texture you chose.

To use the frame, drag a photograph or texture from your inventory to the middle of the frame. If you have a disaster, and accidentally retexture the wrong part of the frame with the photograph, you can easily redo the texture for the whole object, although it is possible to select only certain faces and texture those separately by using "select texture".

And there you have it. You will need to learn to rotate and move the frame, but that's child's play once you have made it. Remember that uploading textures will cost you $10 linden per throw.