Hello all! My name is Jason and I just started using Inkscape earlier today and have watched about 5 hours of YouTube and that is about my experience level . I am trying to design a barber pole. I have the outline of the whole object on one layer, a box that has no fill on the second layer where I want the stripes are to be and a third layer of blue and red and white stripes running diagonal. Please forgive my lack of experience here with the correct jargon but I want to select the stripes that fall inside the box and save only that for this layer and delete the rest. What would this be called ? And how do I do it? Lol I know I have seen something very similar on a video but I cannot find it again. Any help would be greatly appreciated !

Welcome aboard!

You can move objects from one layer to another by pressing Shift+PgUp/PgDown.
Open the layers tab to see it in action (Shift+Ctrl+L).
Layers for such simple drawings are not really necessary at all.
Could you post your work?

I think the process you're looking for is called "cropping" or "clipping." Here's a short and sweet tutorial that should get you on track.

http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/inkscape-faq-how-do-i-crop-in-inkscape/

If I understand you correctly, you probably want one of two things:

1) To use a Boolean operation to remove the parts of the stripes that fall outside the box
2) To use a clipping path to hide the parts of the stripes that fall outside of the box

I've covered both Boolean operations and clipping paths in my Inkscape tutorials for Full Circle Magazine. The former in part 7 and the latter in part 13. You can find links to all of them in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11981