Sands Of Time Hourglass Block Swap 2012 – Month 2

I got my February blocks done for the Sands Of Time Hourglass Block Swap 2012.  This is an 8-month block swap – and these are the four color groups that I made this month.  Each month we make 40 blocks to send in.  Actually we make 48, but we keep 8 blocks for ourselves.  I know it sounds like a LOT of blocks, but really it isn’t.  The hourglass blocks finish up at 3½”, and are easily done using nickel squares (5” squares).  And when chain sewing them – the whole process goes super quick.

The swap is being run by Tanya on the Historical Block Swap group on Yahoo!  It’s based on the Scrappy Hourglass quilt by Kathie Holland in the Sew Scrappy magazine (Volume 2) which was out in January 2012.

If you have a lot of half-square or quarter-square triangles to trim up, you need to get the Perfect Half-Square & Quarter-Square Triangles ruler by June Tailor.  It’s a fantastic product.  I got mine at JoAnn’s, and of course used a 40% coupon.  (sorry for the glare in the picture)  It trims blocks down to 1½”, 2½”, 3½”, 4½”, 5½” and 6½”.

In other (bad) news …

1. On Saturday afternoon I loaded a quilt onto my new, updated HQ-16 frame downstairs only to discover that my stitch regulator is NOT working.  I will be on the phone out to Utah on Monday morning!  I called out there last week to find out why the ProStitcher computer wasn’t booting up properly after the upgrade.  Got that fixed, but didn’t feel well the rest of the week and didn’t try turning the machine on until Saturday afternoon.
2. Our kitchen sink is leaking, so we’ll have to do something about that situation this week.  I’ve been wanting to replace the faucet in there for the last couple of years (we have VERY hard water that destroys a lot of things).  So we may end up replacing the sink and faucet as a way to fix that mess. 
3. When hubby came home from work today, he had a strange look on his face.  He dropped his iPad2 on the concrete floor of the garage right after he got out of the car.  The glass in the one corner cracked.  So now we have to see about fixing that too!