The first article in Ralph Griswold's series on stripe patterns. It defines stripes by color and width, and defines stripe patterns and stripe designs (which add orientation). It describes two representations: parallel color and width sequences, and color/width pair sequences. It also explains reducing repeated adjacent colors and the orientation of stripes at angles between 0° and 90°, with 45° corresponding to regular twills. It is a short conceptual introduction with simple illustrated examples and no weaving drafts.