Monday Meandering 7 - 24 - 2023

I've had a busy weekend and it continues.  First, my daughter and her family came down for an overnight on their way to the beach.  We're about 2 hours south of them and it gives them a nice head start.  They left early Saturday morning and were at the beach club a little after noon.  

Later that day my friend Sharon came for a quilting visit.  We try to do in house retreats at least twice a year - one at mine and one at hers.  We've spent most of the time in the basement studio. She has two big quilts she's quilting with Ruthie. Needless to say, I've not been as focused on my goals from last week as I should have been.  On the other hand the studio got a spiff up and quite a bit of extra cleaning was done upstairs.  

So let's see what I did get done last week.  It really wasn't too bad -- there are still a lot of items checked off.  

7/17/23

Bind Moose in Winter quilt — The binding is made I just haven’t attached it yet. 

✅Read a book — I probably finished 2 or 3 actually. 

✅Pick up the studio especially the front of the cutting table

✅Find backing and quilt the String Bean Blocks — done, need to make binding 

✅Have fun with Sharon 

7/24/23

Bind Moose in Winter quilt

Bind Floral String Bean Blocks 

Make one more FCQ Equilter block and put in the mail 

Sew Two by Two blocks into a top

Find a quilt to quilt

Here's my Floral String Bean quilt being quilted on Ruthie.  See those blue tape pieces?  That's how I measure where I need to mark the next row.  The quilt pattern is an old favorite - Ginger Heart by Apricot Moon.

I didn't take many pictures of quilting activities last week.  I'll try to do better this week. Plus I have Sharon's quilts to share too. 

Now it's on to more of our vacation pictures.  The next stop was in Tallinn, Estonia. As Pat commented last week I had the geography wrong.  From Germany we cruised by Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia to get to Estonia.  Tallinn is quite close to St. Petersburg being about one hour by car.  

Below is the port of Tallinn as we saw it walking down the dock to get to our tour bus. I found the stones? (sculptures in front of the building) interesting. 

Our tour in Tallinn was called Estonia's Soviet Past. I know we heard about some of the reasons that Russia was involved in Estonia as well as the Soviet influence but I admit I don't remember all the examples. The one thing we saw that will remain a stark memory was a KGB prison. Don't think big prison.  This was a house in the old part of Tallinn.  And, inside it was grim. I'll share the pictures I took. First a small sign outside the house. The second paragraph read in English: "One of the most notorious and feared prisons during the Soviet occupation. The exhibition speaks primarily of the crimes against humanity that were committed in this house on Pagari Street." The Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940 - 1941 and again 1944 until the fall of the Soviet Union.  During that time the building housed what became  the KGB's prison cells. The museum consists of two hallways, six prison cells and one solitary confinement cell. 

This is one of the cells. I doubt anything has been cleaned up or repaired since this was used as a prison.  The ground floor where the displays are is quite small. With a tour of 40 people or so I didn't take a lot of time reading the info but did get these pictures. 

This appeared to be a prison cell although I'm not sure what happened behind these doors. 

The solitary confinement unit was awful. Think of a small pantry -- no sitting down, no turning around. And, no, I didn't take a picture. 

One of tour members chose not to enter saying she didn't need to add horrible images and thoughts to her memory.  I think she was right.  

Once we were back out side enjoying the sunshine we walked through Old Town Estonia. 

Tallinn has a beautiful old town section. Since 1997 it has been registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site. 

This beautiful doorway was the entrance to the Brotherhood of Blackheads, an association of local unmarried male merchants, ship-owners, and foreigners. It began in the 1300s although it wasn't until 1407 when it was given specific rights by the Tallinn City Council. You can read more about them in this Wikipedia article. It's amazing how Europe has such deep history.  The Brotherhood is still active in Germany according to the article. 
 

And here's another paean to a long history.  I took this picture specifically to show the age of the building.  Just below the brown triangle at the top of the building is the date it was built: 1410. You should be able to enlarge it to see the date but it isn't very clear. The building is currently used as Estonian History Museum. Unfortunately we did not get to go into it. (The tours we took were mostly half days just to give us a taste of each location.) 

T

There is a beautiful town square near the other buildings I've shared.  I didn't take a picture of it, however, the Tallinn Town Hall made up one side of the square. And, there up high is this lovely dragon gargoyle. You can't see it very well here but if you go to this article there is a great picture of one of them. And, you can read about the long history of this building. 

And, who doesn't like a flower market?  Evidently most of the flowers come from the Netherlands. 

I still have one more day of touring to share as well a few pictures shipboard.

But for now I'm linking with my regular parties. Please take a few minutes to visit some of the other blogs. 

Oh Scrap!

Design Wall Monday

Monday Musings

To Do Tuesday

Happy Quilting All! Bonnie