The first goal was to create an hourglass in CSS, and secondly, I wanted animate it. Third, to turn it into a React component. I wanted to be able to programmatize the length for which you could set a timer. The Hourglass component lets you specify any duration and will behave accordingly with CSS animations. It's included as one of the tools in Letterloom, and you can set a duration there as well as receive a notification when the timer ends.