Rachel Scott
‘I have been patchworking since around 1970, and I started making rugs in 1976. I painted until the late ‘70s. By then, I was weaving and spinning, and I found that much more satisfying. The paintings just pile up, and you can’t walk on or sit on them.’
Rachel Scott
Rachel Scott Bowling’s hands are never idle. As a child, she experimented with knitting, fashioning sweaters for her family that, while endearing, were ill-fitting. She studied painting at the Royal College of Art, her early canvases filled with earthy tones and ambiguous forms. Rachel painted up until the late 70s, weaving offered a new creative challenge, and a more tactile satisfaction. Unlike her paintings that piled up in her Pimlico flat, rugs, she reasoned, could be used and enjoyed, whether sat on or walked over.
Rachel is deeply committed to the functionality of her art, believing that her craft should not only keep her hands busy but also wield practical results for everyday life. Her creative output extends far beyond rugs and paintings, spilling out into the domestic sphere with bags, scarves, pillowcase covers, chess sets, and even tiny pipe-cleaner creatures.
But it’s her patchwork dresses that have grown to be her signature. She wears only her own creations, each dress a testament to thrift and ingenuity. The patches she replaces as needed, ensuring each garment remains wearable, unique, and seemingly timeless.
Join Canadian-British, London-based fashion designer Edeline Lee and Rachel as they explore Rachel’s life, experiences, and creative journey in an intimate conversation held at Rachel’s Pimlico, London home, which she shares with her husband, renowned painter Frank Bowling.
Like Rachel, Edeline believes in clothing as both expression and function. Her meticulously crafted pieces—handmade in England—have found a natural home in the art world, worn by creatives who appreciate their refined, architectural elegance.
Known for her immersive and performative shows at London Fashion Week, Edeline designs with modern life in mind—precision-cut silhouettes in resilient fabrics that move effortlessly, empowering women to step forward with confidence.
Rachel & Edeline in Conversation
The Patchwork Principle
Edeline: Did someone teach you how to knit?
Rachel: Yes, my mother taught me to knit when I was about eight or nine. I remember knitting jerseys for my brother and my father which didn’t fit so I undid them and later used the crinkly wool to make crocheted squares for my skirts and jackets. My mother-in-law taught me to crochet.
Edeline: And have you always made your own clothes?
Rachel: Well, I can only remember going and buying one piece of clothing in the 1950s, a blue jersey, because one just made one's own in those days. My grandfather said he would give me a dress when I came to London in 1959. So, I went to Fifth Avenue in Oxford Circus and bought a dress made out of the newest man-made fibre, dacron. I wore it a few times and then cut it up to make patchwork. The school uniform was grey skirts in winter and striped dresses in the summer. When I was a student at the Royal College of Art, I used to buy materials from Primavera, a shop on Sloane Street which had beautiful Madras cotton and textiles from Scandinavia. I made simple tops and skirts and knitted jerseys.
Edeline: So, you would actually pull them apart?
Rachel: Yes, even jerseys that I knitted myself; I often then undid them to make crochet patches. I remember making a skirt out of a blanket when I was at the Royal College of Art. I must have looked really peculiar.
Edeline: Did you have friends and people around you who were also making crafts at the time?
Rachel: I can't remember anybody else doing that. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, John Lewis in Oxford Street had its ground floor full of materials: corduroys, cotton, wool, gaberdine, etc., dress patterns, and haberdashery, so a lot of people must have been making their own clothes in those days.
Edeline: Were you making things with fabric the whole time while you were at the Royal College, while you were also painting?
Rachel: Yes, that is right.
Edeline: How did you turn into patchworking?
Rachel: I didn't start making patchwork until after the birth of my two daughters in 1967 and 1970.
I started to cut up the clothes I had and then began to make patchwork dresses. I wanted something that would last, that was easy to wash. If a patch gave out, I had another patch to put in, so that they would go on forever - and they have gone on forever.
I stopped making them over twenty years ago as they will see me out! Then I also went to a lot of Jumble sales in aid of schools and charities, bought beautiful lambswool jerseys for 10p each, undid them, and made stripy jerseys from the unravelled wool and crocheted and knitted suits. I have also always bought Shetland wool mail order from the Shetland Isles.
Edeline: Did someone ever actually teach you how to make a patchwork, or did you figure it out by yourself?
Rachel: I just figured it out.
Edeline: Did you make things because you wanted something to wear, or because you thought of something you'd like to wear, and made those things?
In a sense, do you think it was a bit of a fashion decision as well?
Rachel: I don't know. At the time, the trends were with Mary Quant and the miniskirt. It was lovely going down the King's Road and going past her shop on the corner there.
Edeline: When Mary Quant was doing all these miniskirts, were you still making this shape of garment?
Rachel: Yes, although I think my knees did show at one point. I haven't got the legs for Mary Quant’s style.
Edeline: In a way, you designed them to fit what you wanted?
Rachel: Yes, I think so.
Edeline: Since the early 70s, you have only worn your patchwork garments. Would you say that since then, you have always had your own singular style?
Rachel: I never change, yes, from year to year. Very boring, really. People who see me every day, they must always think I'm wearing the same clothes day in and day out.
Edeline: But I think that the fashionable people must have noticed this, right?
Rachel: I remember one person remarking on it. We were in the National Gallery in the early 80s, Frank and I.
I was wearing a patchwork dress, and an American woman came up to me and said, “That's the most beautiful thing I've seen all day!” In the National Gallery, too. I remember thinking, “What is she talking about?”
I think in America, they notice more things like that and will remark on them. Whereas in England, people might notice, but they don’t remark on them.
Edeline: They’re too polite. This is such a particular individual sense of style that I think people must have been noticing, even if they weren’t commenting on it, especially in contrast to what was going on in fashion at the time.
Do you ever notice what people are wearing?
Rachel: People seem to all wear the same sort of thing, don’t they? All dark clothes and nearly always jeans or trousers. Even though we have Chelsea School of Art just down the street and so many student artists, you would think you would see more interesting clothes, but you don’t really.
Edeline: Because often with clothes, people wear them because it makes them feel protected or more powerful or because they’re trying to put on an identity.
Let me ask you: If you were to be caught in a storm or something, and your clothes were soaked wet, and someone lent you some clothes to wear, would you feel very uncomfortable?
Rachel: Yes. Horrible.
Edeline: Why do you think that? Are clothes also kind of like armour for you?
Rachel: Yes, I suppose they are. They're just part of one's self, aren't they? I don't know if I could wear something else. No, I would find it very difficult.
Edeline: I feel everything for you is about being useful, or practical, or necessary. That seems to be how you have progressed with each thing that you make. It has to be practical.
Rachel: Yes, because if I spill something on an ordinary dress, it's an awful nuisance. What do you do? If it's on a patchwork dress, either you don’t notice it or you just take that bit out and put another patchwork piece in. It’s endlessly renewable - endlessly. It'll go on forever.
That's what's so good about patchwork - the patchwork principle. My knitted chair and sofa covers are also made in the same way. I have all the same coloured wools to replace rectangles and diamonds when they wear out.
Edeline: We should all live by the patchwork principle. Sometimes, in this day and age of Amazon, it seems easier to just throw the whole thing away and buy a new one.
From Monochrome to Multicolour
Edeline: Your clothes are very colourful, but your paintings are actually quite neutral. Or quite sombre.
Rachel: I didn't think painting was about colour in that sort of way. I wanted form, I suppose. My paintings through the ‘60s were mainly in raw and burnt umber and white, and then in the ‘70s, they were black and white and grey of passages, empty rooms and tunnels. At the end of the ‘70s, I painted Dorset landscapes in blues and greens, and then stopped painting as I found spinning and making rugs more satisfying. I love clay and taught pottery for a few years after I left the RCA. I had a kiln in the ‘70s and made pinched pots, farm sets and tea sets for children, as well as chess sets.
But I only started adding colour to my clothes with my children. I remember a big brown jersey I had. I knitted just single colours for myself. The stripes and colours would have come when my children were little. I made things more colourful just for them, really. I also made braided rugs out of the children’s old clothes, nappies and sheets.
Edeline: Did you make clothing for your children then?
Rachel: When they were little, I made clothes for them, but mainly, it would have been knitted jerseys, stripy jerseys. When they were older, I made a few, but they would rather have shop clothes.
Edeline: Obviously, life changes when you become a mother. Did you feel that what you were doing, did it all change after you became a mother?
Rachel: I suppose it did. I can remember sitting Marcia up in her pram and trying to paint. It was a bit difficult, but I think it became easier when she and Iona started going to school. Whatever time one had was so precious. I was doing the big, dark paintings at the time. As they went more and more to school, one just tried to use that time more for painting.
When they were around, I would do things like knitting and making pipe cleaner toys and things like that. It was also so important to have someone else trying to do what one was doing oneself.
I had one really good old friend who was also an artist, and had children of the same age, and we used to support each other. When she looked after my children, I would paint, and vice versa.
The Patchwork Formula
Edeline: I saw a photograph of you and Frank both wearing the same pattern jacket you had made. Did you wear things to match as well?
Rachel: I don't think we would have noticed.
Edeline: Your patchwork dresses have a hexagonal shape. I would think that when you first start with patchwork, you'd start with squares, as those are easier?
Rachel: In a way, I think that would have been more difficult, wouldn't it?
The hexagon is a typical shape for patchwork.
Edeline: So, you started with the same template and you've used the same one ever since?
Rachel: Yes.
Edeline: You designed this perfect garment, in a way. Did it come over time, or was it a process?
Rachel: From the very beginning, this design seemed to be the only way. There is no shaping, just elastic around the waist and wrists.
Edeline: Do you count the pieces you need for a dress?
Rachel: Yes - approximately 485.
Edeline: How did you choose the patchwork for a specific dress? Did you stick with a few fabrics for each dress? Would you decide in advance?
Rachel: Yes, I have forgotten how I did it.
I'd separate them out. If I wanted to make a blue and purple dress, I’d have a great big basket full of materials which I would have chosen fabrics from.
Edeline: You would only use cotton, correct?
Rachel: Nearly always cotton, yes, because it's the most comfortable. I didn't want man-made fabric. I have one manmade fabric dress which frays and pulls apart. Cotton, even if it's rather fine cotton, is generally sturdier.
Edeline: How do you wash them?
Rachel: Very easily. I wouldn't put them in the washing machine because they wouldn't last long. I wash them by hand. And then spin them in the washing machine.
Edeline: They're so precious, I wouldn't put them in the washing machine either.
Rachel: Yes, washing by hand is what puts people off, really, doesn’t it? I've always washed by hand.
Edeline: I think nowadays, we perceive that we don't have the time to do these things. We don't have the time to make like this, or wash like this, or care for things. But actually, I don't know what we spend all our time on that's more valuable.
From Canvas to Loom
Edeline: Tell me about that transition from painting to the rugs.
Rachel: I have been patchworking since around 1970, and I started making rugs in 1976. I painted until the late seventies.
By then, I was weaving and spinning, and I found that much more satisfying. The paintings just pile up, and you can't walk on or sit on them.
The landscapes were the last ones that I made in 1978, 1979, and if I wanted to go on painting, I would have to go on making drawings of places mainly in Dorset. That was where I spent my childhood. Continuing to make them, I couldn't see that that would be satisfying - not in the way that making rugs is. Having things to do all day at odd times, it's much easier with a rug than with a painting.
Edeline: Was this decision also related to your schedule?
Rachel: Yes, partly because of my schedule. In those days, my loom was in the family house in Kennington, and that's where I did my painting as well. I would drive with Frank to his studio in the early morning with my bicycle in the back of the car, leave him in the studio and bicycle to the family house where I would work until lunchtime and then go and fetch him to go home to Pimlico. For the last 20 years my loom has been here in Pimlico. From 1990 until a few years ago, we spent spring and autumn in our loft in Brooklyn. I made a lot of knitted garments there as I was without the loom. In the 1990s, I used to go to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to buy cotton from the fabric shops, but then they moved out and smart restaurants and fashion shops took over.
The painting was much more difficult, of course, because it's much messier. But I don't think it was because of the messiness that I stopped. I just didn't feel that I wanted to go on making paintings of the Dorset countryside for the rest of my life.
The Worth of Craft
Rachel: But I also made jackets, cushion covers, purses, scarves and hats to sell along with the rugs, and also woolly animal brooches.
Edeline: Oh, I'm so envious of those people who bought those jackets!
Rachel: One jacket was about £300.
Edeline: What was it like to sell the objects you were making?
Rachel: I was selling them in fairs and craft markets. The Craft Council always rejected my applications to have a stall. 2010 was the first time I managed to get a stall at the Origin Craft Fair in Somerset House.
It's very hard to make money with crafts, especially with the rugs. They are worth very little, which is difficult when you think of the amount of time that goes into making them. It’s not about the money, though. You just go on making them.
Edeline: Well, I just think that they haven't been valued as much. They're probably worth a lot, considering the amount of time and effort that goes into making anything by hand. Did you find that certain things were more popular than others when you were just selling them?
Rachel: In the early 70s, I started with pipe cleaners. Three pipe cleaners made a horse, two pipe cleaners made a dog and one pipe cleaner made a bear. I also made crocheted owls and pussycats in pea-green boats.
I just made them to give away. Then, when we started having Open Studios where Frank’s studio is in the Pullens near Elephant & Castle, they wanted things for children. I found some little animals from the ‘70s and sold them for about 50p each. They all went very quickly.
Artist or Maker?
Edeline: Rachel, do you see yourself as an artist? With your needlework, woolwork, crocheting, knitting, weaving… What do you like to be called?
Rachel: Artist? I don't know what I call myself. I'm just someone who just makes things, really.
Edeline: Are you a maker?
Rachel: It’s difficult because there are words that I don't like. I think most people don't like the word ‘craft’ because it's something much more important than that. I wish it was a different word. And ‘makers’—I think maker probably is a more recent word, isn't it, to cover what is often done by women. It's difficult to find a word.
Edeline: It's a stupid division, isn't it?
Rachel: It is. There really shouldn't be any division.
Edeline: I often say I'm a dressmaker because, in a way, a fashion designer sometimes doesn't really encompass the craft and the skill of what we're actually doing.
Rachel: People don't realise the intricacies of actually making things.
Edeline: It seems actually more solid and real to call myself a dressmaker. But then there's this idea that a dressmaker is someone who just is making clothes one by one, kind of less popular clothes for one woman at a time. It's not the same. It's not as much of an art as a fashion design, which doesn't make any sense.
Rachel: I like to describe myself as a weaver because that seems the simplest way and I like the word, weaver. It has a very long history and tradition going back into the mists of time. My name, Rachel, in Hebrew, means ewe, a mother sheep. The mother sheep that weaves.
Edeline: I like that. Maybe you're living your fate, in a way!
With special thanks to Iona Scott, Marcia Scott, and Laura Vasile for their contributions to this profile.
BECOME PART OF RACHEL’S STORY
Rachel has chosen the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) as her nominated charity. RBST champions native livestock and equine breeds, essential for both sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.Centuries of adaptation to the UK’s diverse landscapes have equipped these breeds with unique abilities: they restore soil, enhance biodiversity, and offer diverse economic opportunities. RBST champions their preservation through government lobbying, genetic conservation, and promoting conservation grazing as a vital tool for land regeneration.
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