So basically, I have two concentric circles with stroke colour but no fill, a smaller circle inside of a larger circle. I want to have a simple braided pattern fill the space between the two circles - nothing outside the larger circle, and nothing inside the smaller circle. I have already built the pattern, but it is in a straight line. Basically, I want to warp that pattern from a straight line into a ring that will fill the space outside the smaller circle but inside the larger circle. How can I do this? Can I bend the pattern I've created, or is there some way to produce a ring-shaped pattern from scratch without having to detail every little line individually?

I am rather new at graphical designing in general, and I've not done much with Inkscape so far beyond some basics. I am building a custom set of playing cards; I've got a bunch of number cards in five suits already finished, but I'm having some trouble with the more detailed cards, such as this one, as well as four other cards that will also feature patterns warped into rings. Thanks for any advice you can offer!

Welcome GarrickW!

Extension menu > Generate from Path > Pattern Along Path
This should do exactly what you want, although other members/visitors might have other suggestions. What you'll need to do first, is create a 3rd circle, the do Path menu > Object to Path. This 3rd circle/path will be placed between the 2 existing circles, and I'm thinking you'll probably want it to be centered between, as much as possible. Although it may depend on your pattern, and you might need to experiment some with the placement. If the pattern has directionality, and you find that it's backwards, just do Path menu > Reverse, before applying pattern to path. But if it's completely symmetrical, no worries.

Also, please check out my signature for links to some excellenet instructional materials. You can find help with almost everything Inkscape can do, in the tavmjong bah Guide. But please feel free to reply if you can't figure something out. We're here to help

(Depending on your pattern, you might find it works better to use Markers.)

Wow, thanks for the quick reply! I'll give it a shot this afternoon, and if I'm not sure about something I'll come back. Thanks again!

All right, so the first card was a breeze with your instructions, and I really have to thank you for that! Everything worked perfectly, and I'm happy with the result.

So I decided to move on to the next card and repeat the process, but with a different pattern. Unfortunately, this pattern isn't bending well at all. Perhaps this is because of the different nature of the pattern; the first pattern was a series of Bezier curves defining a simple braid, as well as a fill-in shape. That's the one that worked. The pattern I have now is a pair of straight lines on the longer edges of a coloured but strokeless rectangle, filled with several rounded 4-corner polygons that have been skewed at various angles, and have both stroke and fill colour (different colours).

When I try to get it to follow the path, the two straight lines curve, but too much, so that they stick out instead of following the curve of the circle. The rectangle doesn't curve at all; it just bends in the middle, at an angle. The polygons in the middle are basically okay, though on several of them the stroke becomes much thicker than I want it to be. I suppose I could manage this one all manually, but that would take a huge amount of time (the base pattern fits 4 times around the circle and has about 30 polygons, which would all have to be angled individually, though I could just do a quarter of the circle and then copy it around, I suppose). Any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Thanks again for the help!

Could you upload us a screen shot? I can't picture what the problem is. (Also maybe the 1st one the worked as you like, partly because I think it's an interesting project but also to help clarify the problem.)

I hope my uploading the pictures worked. Here is the first image, the one that worked well. It still needs a little touching-up, but it's better than I expected it to be:

http://img52.imageshack.us/i/goodwoodemperor.png/

And here is me attempting to bend the second pattern around a circle. The pattern, straight, is next to the circle. See how everything seems to pop out of place?

http://img714.imageshack.us/i/badearthemperor.png/

I have in the meantime managed a manually-crafted solution, but I still have three more cards to design, and I am afraid this problem will crop up again, and the other cards are not as easy to do directly. Any assistance you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Oh, ok I see what the problem is. There IS naturally going to be some distortion of the image in the process, because the path is curved, indeed a circle. So it has to sort of stretch along the outside and crowd in along the inside. I've never been clear about the difference between the 'Snake' and 'Ribbon' settings, but you could try switching, if you haven't already. I'm not sure if that will help the "popping out of place", but it can't hurt to try.

If that doesn't help, there might be a different way to create the pattern. And others might be able to spot the problem right away. I haven't used pattern along path very much, so I'm not sure. But I can see that something funky is happening. It should be relatively easy to fix, but someone else will have to chime in on that.

But for the part of the problem where it doesn't make a circle, you'll want to use either 'Repeated' or 'Repeated, stretched'. Make space between copies zero.

Maybe once you see it in the full path/circle, the "popping out" won't seem so bad? But hopefully other members/visitors will have a solution?