For years, I’ve used this Anchor Hocking Glass Cake Stand and love it. It actually doubles as a punch bowl when you invert the base and set the lid into it. It’s the perfect season for cookies, but I needed a way to keep them covered, so I decided to make a simple acrylic lid from 1/4" to set on top.
Thanks to @bbum for his post on mandalas, I stole one of them to decorate the top, then cut along the outermost path.
A smaller version would do nicely as a cake plate to fit inside the whole dome and make clean up even easier.
I do really wish there was an easy way to merge the paths in these while still keeping them as simple line vectors so they can be scored much much faster than rasterizing and then engraving. I’ve tried everything I can think of in Illustrator and there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it other than by hand two layers at a time. Too much work! So I opted to just engrave it which took an hour. If anyone has some clues to how to do this better, please share. I even tried exporting in super high resolution then doing an image trace to convert it back, but no go.
The Shape Builder tool is great for a lot of things, but the mandalas have many many paths to “objectify” it would be rather tedious, and in many instances you could end up with paths that overlap.
Sure! They are more commonly known as “strip heaters” for acrylic or pvc. Many YouTube videos on the subject, a lot of people do this rather unsafely though. Ideally you want some water cooling tubes running as well around the heat strip so you get a clean sharp bend as only the thin line of material is heated to pliability. It introduces a who new dimension to your projects. I designed the flat file for the shelf in illustrator and it gets cut with the screw holes already, then I bend the acrylic in two places. Total time after design is done is about 15 min. I plan to make 3 more.
That is really nice. I remember making a peach trifle one summer. I had the sponge cake and cream and everything ready to go but then got stumped on the right kind of bowl. I didn’t have a nice trifle bowl. My sister is looking at my big Anchor cake plate with glass cover and says, what about that. I said, “That’s a cake stand”. It won’t stand up balanced in the lid handle. She proceeded to flip everything around, “Tada!” Boy, did I feel stupid.