More Clear Acrylic: Anchor Hocking Cake Stand / Bowl Lid

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.

Fun and easy every-day projects!

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Turned out beautiful, I don’t think a score would be as visible. :slightly_smiling_face:

But, if you want to pull off a centerline trace in illustrator, after you rasterize it:

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What are those red and white cookies? They look yummy. :blush:

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Peppermint with white chocolate. Kind of like a candy cane!

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Beautiful. And now I am hungry.

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What a great idea! I have a similar cake stand…I’ll have to make one for myself!

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Practicing acrylic bending with a hot wire, for floating shelves.

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Kindly provide a bit more info on the hot wire technique??

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Me too. This keto diet is killing me.

Are you using a current-ish version of AI? If so the Shape Builder tool is one of the fastest ways to intuitively combine things.

Yes I have creative cloud it’s always up to date.

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.

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The overlaps are where Shape Builder shines! Hold down alt to subtract, works on both segments and shapes. A stylus like a Wacom helps.

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.

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Love the bend on the acrylic. Plus excellent idea for the lid.

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