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Nantucket baskets are sturdy and decorative

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What’s the difference between a lightship basket and a friendship basket? You may have seen both terms applied to the famous wood and rattan woven baskets made in Nantucket. Lightship baskets, the original name given to this distinctive style, were originally made by the crews of lightships, which were essentially floating lighthouses, in the late 1800s. The work left the crew with long stretches of time with little to do, so they turned their attention to making baskets in the time-honored tradition of sailors making crafts to pass the time at sea. “Friendship basket” is a ...

Solar lights

Lifestyle Feature

After retiring as a Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M) production worker, Terry Blume became interested in creating crafty, do-it-yourself outdoor designs including solar lights around her New Ulm residence. She said she found solar light design ideas online. The front and back of her ...

Kimbel & Cabus furniture rare and valuable

Lifestyle Feature

Identify the designer of an antique and it will usually sell for more. Sometimes an attribution is enough. This Aesthetic Movement table with ebonized finish, incised gilt decoration and flower panels sold for an impressive $6,144 at Neal Auction. While you can’t dismiss its visual appeal -- after all, it was made during the Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century, the time of “art for art’s sake” -- its attribution to New York firm Kimbel & Cabus was probably a factor in its selling. The Kimbel & Cabus firm was active from 1862 to 1882 and famous for exhibiting their ...

Recent reads

Lifestyle Feature

Here are few of my favorite recent reads. Library staff would be happy to help you place requests on these or any other titles. If you’d like to place your own request, visit www.newulmlibrary.org and choose Library Catalog. Cole, recently divorced, has moved from London to a small village on the English coast, where he is a park ranger for the coastal area. One day he has a verbal altercation with two young women who are hiking throughout the country to raise awareness of violence against women. The women are walking too close to a crumbling cliff, and Cole’s persistent urging for ...

The many props of Jennifer Deutz

Lifestyle Feature

In the lower levels of State Street Theater Company (SSTC) there is a series of rooms filled with a wide assortment of odds and ends. One room is filled with plastic plants and other faux greenery. The room next door is lined with rows and rows of old telephones and typewriters. The nearby ...

1000 books before kindergarten

Lifestyle Columns

Did you know that children whose parents read to them just five books a day will hear over 1.4 million more words by the time they enter kindergarten than children who are not read to each day? Ohio State’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy member, Jessica Logan, says this research into the “million word gap” came from one of her earlier studies. In that study they found that almost one-fourth of children in a national sample were never read to and another fourth were seldom read to, perhaps only once or twice a week. “The fact that we had so many parents who ...