I would like to use a carbon fiber background image inside of a vector shape in inkscape.
But I can’t seem how to either import the carbonfiber.jpg as a pattern or to intersect the raw .jpg with the vector shape. Any ideas?
Thanks! Worked like a charm 
I am still pretty green and don’t see myself getting too crazy with my project, so Inkscape is OK for now. But I will keep your comments in mind if/when I grow my site.
As best I remember from my Inkscape days:
- Hit ctrl-i and navigate to your picture to import it
- With the picture selected, hold down alt and hit i. This will convert your bitmap to a pattern that you can use as a fill. Additionally, it will transform the bitmap into an editable rectangle pre-filled with your new pattern.
- Your pattern will now be available in the fill and stroke dialog for use in any future shapes.
If you haven’t used Inkscape much, let me give you a bit of advice: Invest in Corel Graphics Suite, Xara, or Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop instead!
Inkscape is great for a free program and my hat is off to the devs, but I was never able to get bitmap embedding to work properly in Inkscape, which was a deal-killer for me.
I hate to resurrect an old thread, but for the benefit of searchers, I wanted to follow up and say that Inkscape has apparently fixed the embedding issues in .48.