cannot rotate or scale fill pattern

The handles to scale and rotate a stock pattern are in the upper left corner of the page, you might have to zoom out or pan to find them while the node tool is active.

from the manual:
«Adjusting Patterns is done by a set of handles. The handles will appear when an object with a Pattern fill is selected and the node or one of the shape tools is active. The handles will appear on the original objects that defined the Pattern, or the former location of those objects if they have been moved or deleted (unless the Pattern has been previously adjusted). In the case of built-on Patterns they will appear in the upper-left corner of the canvas. The following figure shows the location of the handles for a Pattern that has not been adjusted. »
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Attributes-Fill-Stroke.html#Attributes-Patterns-Adjusting>

You are quite right: the handles are there all the time but they were some distance away from the bounding box of the object I was filling. They were on the page boundary. I needed to zoom out to see them. Thank you.

However I now encounter a bug such that fiddling with the handles causes Inkscape to crash. It says it has encountered an internal error and will close. The problem is intermittent and I cannot give you a recipe to reproduce it but it happens on a drawing with two layers, the bottom of which is a bitmap, and happens when I move the pattern rotation or scaling handles and sometimes when I move a node on the filled curve.

Thanks ~suv, that solved my question.

Im having the similar problem, cannot find handle with node tool.