Basil plants for free – in five minutes

I can't smell basil without being whisked back to the greengrocer's in Rome where I first encountered fresh basil. Sent out to shop for tomatoes for dinner by the friend-of-a-friend I was staying with, I asked the shopkeeper, who was on the phone, for pomodori, and he weighed them out. Then I asked for basilico, and he gestured for me to take a massive bunch. I offered my cash and he waved it away, as if to say: you can't have tomatoes without basil.

The dinner that our host made that night is something I still love – I ate it this week. It's a more substantial version of insalata tricolore, adding pasta to the mozzarella, tomatoes, basil and avocado. I also like to add olives, sundried tomatoes and toasted pine nuts.

I like to have a constant supply of basil but it's tricky to grow from seed, and if you buy packets of fresh basil it dries out and goes brown very quickly. I find the easiest way to have enough for your summer eating (homemade pesto! Mmm) is to buy a pot of growing basil from the supermarket. The pots are always full to bursting with little basil plants to ensure a large head of pickable leaves.

All you need to do is take the little plants out, and repot them in a bigger container where they'll continue to grow, and each one will become a bushy plant, with lots of delicious basil leaves. So you'll have enough basil to see you through the summer. And if you have plants left when autumn approaches, take the pot indoors.

Meet sewing's famous fans

See the celebrity stitchers...

Kate Winslet
The actor had a hands-on role with the props for The Dressmaker, the 2015 film about a seamstress who transforms people's lives in a small Australian town. 'I really had to learn to use that sewing machine,' she says. 'In fact, the one we used in the film was mine, the one that I had learnt on, and I took it over to Australia so that we could use it in the film,' she told the Sydney Morning Herald, adding: 'I've always wanted to be one of those mums that could knock up cute little curtains. Or make a sweet little pair of pants of some kind, and I can now.'

Judi Dench
Dame Judi is mad keen on needlework, and isn't averse to tackling hard-hitting designs. When she appeared in Amy's View by David Hare in 1997, she gave him a cushion embroidered with the words: 'F*ck 'em, f*ck 'em, f*ck 'em, f*ck 'em', a motto which referred to the theatre critics.

Kirstie Allsopp
The TV presenter loves to keep her hands busy and bewails the decline in craft skills: 'So many mums had sewing machines when I was growing up but as a nation we've lost the ability to mend and create things ourselves. Rediscovering sewing [for her TV programme Kirstie's Homemade Home] was like riding a bicycle.'

Eva Longoria
Bringing a note of glamour to being a domestic goddess, Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria reveals how she spends her time when she's not gracing the red carpet in Cannes:
'I'm a 1950s housewife. I love baking. I love sewing. Being home with Tony. My mother was like that. Always took care of her husband. I always admired and wanted to do that.'

Venus Williams
Sister Serena explains: 'When [Venus] was younger, she would make clothes for her dolls out of her old clothing. But now she has started to design outfits to show off her model-like figure.' And her on-court outfits have attracted criticism.
'I have a great imagination,' Venus added in the sisters' interview with Tennis Magazine, 'and I always like to do different things.'

Chris Martin
The Coldplay frontman has shared some of the band's secrets of looking good on stage - and team bonding.
'Making clothes together in our studio makes us feel complete. We probably sound like a group of grannies in a knitting circle but it's the truth and it gives us some control over our visual identity,' the Mirror quoted him as saying. And he and his bandmates are always on the lookout for a sewing opportunity while they're in hotels on tour: 'We see if they have a sewing kit in the amenities drawer in case we feel inspired,' he said.

Tilda Swinton
The quirkily stylish actress, who played the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe has been seen in some striking outfits on the red carpet. She says she likes wearing handmade clothes 'because I really appreciate the work that goes into them'. As a teenager, Tilda experimented with designing her own clothes and when she unearthed across a dress she'd made back then, she ended up wearing it. 'I put it on for a bit of a laugh, but I ended up enjoying wearing it - though I didn't look in many mirrors. It was hand done, because I had never learned how to operate an electric sewing machine.'

Miranda Richardson
During breaks in shooting The Young Victoria Miranda Richardson discovered a great way to stay occupied. ‘There were long gaps between filming and I was bored. I spent my time cross stitching,' she told the Daily Mail. ‘But I made it fun by stitching naughty words into handkerchiefs.'

Tracey Emin
The artist revealed in The Lady that sewing gives her a sense of purpose, and confided that it takes her mind off masturbation. Well, it certainly keeps your hands busy...
'When I think about my work, and my sewing, and about my blankets, I know what I'm doing,' she says. 'I can cut out a sentence in felt in five minutes; it would take most people that amount of time just to cut out one letter.'

Lily Allen
Following the recent opening of her vintage clothes shop, Lucy in Disguise, in central London, it seems the singer has been inspired by her fabric-filled surroundings. While creating her new fashion label with her sister Sarah, she’s developing her sewing skills. ‘I'm embroidering,’ she told The Sun. ‘I'm actually in the process of making cushions'.

Meet knitting's famous fans

See which top celebrities can't stay away from the wool...

Scarlett Johansson
Holed up in her Tokyo hotel in Lost in Translation, Scarlett knitted a scarf as part of her role (later included as a pattern in the book Mother of Purl: Friends, Fun and Fabulous Designs at Hollywood's Knitting Circle by Edith Eig, £11.99), and is reputed to be a knitting fan off screen too. Scarlett may also have taught someone else...

Ryan Reynolds 
He used to be married to Scarlett Johansson, so she may have taught him the basics. If not, it certainly sounds like he's keen to learn. As he played comic-book character Deadpool in the X-Men movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he was asked what he would choose as his super-power in real life. He said: 'I would go with the much less violent approach - my super power would be something more like knitting, my mutant ability would have a calming effect.'
He added that it was 'a challenge' learning to handle knitting needles, sorry, swords, for the role.

Debra Messing
We can't always do what we like, but spare a thought for Debra Messing, of TV's Will & Grace, who loves to knit but unfortunately suffers from an allergy to... wool.
Knitting expert to the stars Edith Eig, who taught Messing to knit and helps her find non-wool yarn, says, 'She's allergic to anything that's wool. She can't even touch wool and if she wears it she breaks out in hives.' Edith also reveals that Debra's first knit was a blue sweater for her dog.

Tracey Ullman
Recently returned from the US, the comedian learnt to knit as a child, but didn't take it up as a hobby until she was filming in Baltimore, and a wool shop gave her the knitting bug.
'It was the window,' she says. 'It was like, edible - the colours and the textures of this wool - and it was bamboo baskets and needles and it was so different from when I was a child: all this awful acrylic post-war wool.'
After taking a refresher course in Baltimore Tracey was hooked, taking her craft to painful extremes. 'I knitted with some very tough wool,' she says. 'I was obsessed and I was making a bag and I couldn't stop. In the morning, I literally had blisters on my fingers.'
Undeterred, Tracey has since co-written a knitting book, Knit 2 Together with Los Angeles yarn-store owner Mel Clark.

Jimmy Hill
Former footballer and commentator Jimmy Hill knew his 'yarn forward' from his 'centre forward'. Back in 1996, he was at a longest knitted scarf fundraising event in aid of St Catherine's Hospice in East Sussex, when he was asked to pose as if knitting the scarf. He commented that he didn't feel a fraud with the needles as he did actually learn to knit as a boy. My sources don't reveal whether he ever knitted his own football scarf or hat...

Uma Thurman
Better known for wielding a sword in her Kill Bill role, Uma Thurman is nifty with the needles. She was spotted at an LA knitting supplies shop, having bought over 30 balls of wool (including cashmerino - mmm, soft!), plus some needles and a T-shirt featuring a woman knitting.

Sarah Jessica Parker
The actor likes to knit during a break in filming. And apparently, she's keen to share her skills. A source said: 'As soon as shooting stops, Sarah's back to her knitting. She's introduced lots of other people to it - everyone is hooked.' Sarah Jessica was taught to knit by her Sex and the City co-star Kristin Davis.

Kate Moss
Knitting has many benefits, but Kate Moss may have discovered a new one: partying substitute. The model/fashion designer, seen here sampling the softness of her scarf, was given a knitting set one  Christmas by ex-husband Jamie Hince, to wean her off her hedonistic tendencies. According to a source in the Daily Star: 'Kate is trying to keep her new obsession a secret as she thinks it's seriously uncool. She carries her needles and wool hidden away in a big black Chanel bag.

Catherine Zeta Jones - and Antonio Banderas 
Teaching someone else to knit is a great thing to do, and Catherine Zeta Jones was happy to pass on her skills during the filming of The Legend of Zorro. Catherine is a well-known devotee of knitting - it's on record that she knitted loads of ponchos and scarves as Christmas gifts a couple of years ago - and she taught her Zorro co-star Antonio Banderas, to help occupy himself while he recovered from an injury.

Julia Roberts
Life on a film set involves a lot of sitting around between shooting, and several actors have discovered that knitting is the perfect pick-up, put-down pastime. Julia Roberts certainly finds it's the case: 'It's just great to make things. To have a pile of yarn and make it into something.'
Rumoured to be starring in The Friday Night Knitting Club, she's sure to find knitting an aid to killing time between takes – and perhaps getting into character. The film is still in development, but you can read the novel it's based on.

Lily Allen
The singer declared her love for - among other things - knitting!
The singer-turned-fashion designer is taking some time out from enjoying marital bliss and saying goodbye to her wild party lifestyle by picking up the knitting needles. She said: ‘I'm being taught how to knit. I'm so not rock 'n' roll any more.’

Meet crochet's famous fans

Discover the big names who are hooked on crochet...

Aretha Franklin
'C-R-O-C-H-E-T, find out what it means to me...'
We have no idea whether the queen of soul plans to rework one of her greatest hits, but we can confirm that she likes to crochet. She has told a biographer: '‘I crochet. I’ve made a number of skirts, berets, various articles.’

Eva Longoria
Wearing her art, or perhaps craft, on her sleeve, Eva Longoria dons a little lacy number. She told AskMen how she likes to crochet while filming: 'When we do Desperate Housewives; you don’t have any time in your trailer and you’re just constantly going back and forth. We do 14 pages [of script] in a day. Then I would go to the movie, and it was like vacation. It was more like two pages a day. I'd watch movies in my trailer. I was crocheting.'

Bette Davis
For Bette Davis, art imitated life: she took her hobbies to work with her, knitting on camera in several films, frequently between takes, and crocheting some rather intricate lace throughout the 1940 film The Letter.

Jane Seymour
Actress Jane Seymour, best known for Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman is an all-round creative type and crochet fan, saying: 'I love to play with colour and texture. Ever since I can remember, I've been making my own clothes, embroidering, knitting and crocheting.'

Meryl Streep
Mamma mia! Another actress who likes to crochet between scenes. We know this because one of her co-stars on Silkwood talked about it in an interview. And who was that co-star?...

Cher
The co-star with whom Meryl Streep shared crocheting sessions on the set of Silkwood was none other than Cher, who said about working with Meryl: 'We’d knit, crochet, and joke about men.'

Balancing on the beach

We all have that basic urge to throw stones into the sea when we're at the beach, don't we? I do, too, and I also like to pile stones on top of each other, or next to each other, or balance stones on pieces of wood, or wood on wood...

Here's a stone circle I made while staying in a yurt near Machynlleth, and pebble feet plus a quartz line meandering across different stones. And more recently, here's a little tower I made last weekend on the beach in West Sussex. There are a couple of shingle spits projecting out into the sea and on this one the tide was coming in from both sides. I made a five-stone tower and retreated to the 'mainland' to watch it be washed away.

On the way back to the motorhome, I found a length of wave-washed wood lying on the shingle, so I scooped a hollow with my heel, stood it upright and heaped stones around it, then placed a lichen-covered stone and an oyster shell on top of it.

Welcome to my new (motor)home!

Not my permanent residence, but I've spent a fair bit of time in my new moho (short for motorhome) so far! And although the interior decor isn't as lairy as some I've seen, it could still do with some improvement. The easiest way to do this, I felt, was to make a version of the traditional 'home sweet home' cross-stitch sign.

So I created a pattern from an online cross-stitch pattern generator (see the printout below), the embroidery hoop came down off the wall, and off I went.

I did all of the green stitching in one session, for the two 'moho's and the two hearts, fuelled by beer in the pub the moho was parked outside for the night.


Then I chose the contrast colour for the word 'sweet' and the border: a lipstick-red.

The mistakes I made are visible in this pic - can you see them? Not that it bothers me: absolute perfection in anything handmade is rare!

All it needs now is a little frame and it can hang in the moho.