Hi folks
New to the forum!
I`m a woodturner and have made a wooden bowl and plan to transfer a border pattern to it.
I want to be able to convert a rectangular piece of a design maybe in .jpg or .gif format to a curved image to fit the outer top surface of the bowl. Someone very kindly told me about a tutorial in sketchup which could do this but unfortunately it requires various `pro` versions of software to do so and I wondered if I could do this (I believe its called `Radial bending`) in Inkscape?. The attachment shows a bowl I made before but this border pattern was formed by using an already printed and shaped pattern that was 1/8th the circumference and copied 8 times round the edge.
Many thanks
Steve

There's more than one way to do it, try reading here http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... gPath.html
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... nAlongPath
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... ke-Markers

convert a rectangular piece of a design maybe in .jpg or .gif format to a curved image

This is the catch I am afraid, because Inkscape doesn't really do very well at bending raster images. you can 1) use the gimp a raster editing program, or 2) Use the trace bitmap command to convert your image to vector and then use Inkscape's tools to bend it. without seeing the image it's not possible to determine which option would be better for you - the celtic knotwork in your example would be quite easy to convert...

Thanks for the quick and helpful replies guys, I`ll checkout the options you have mentioned. Have to get me a book
Regards
Steve