From a gift for a dying husband to a celebration of a son's coming of age, Elizabeth Burke meets five women who stitched the essence of their families into some very special quilts

If budget restrictions limit your purchasing power to Ikea, pick up a paintbrush and allow your imagination free rein instead. Perri Lewis shows you how

Try as I might, I can't help but fill my flat with stuff from Ikea. A mug here, a coffee table there: yes, it's cheap and well-designed, but the odd purchase every few months has left me living somewhere that is a little too identikit for my liking.

Is the recycling stack precariously high? Make all that paper into something useful again. Cat Davison gives a new lease of life to scrap paper with a simply bound notebook