Staff Sergeant Lady was a working dog for the US Army, doing tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with her handler. She recently retired and has gone home to be a pet to her handler and his family. This project contains her Honorable Discharge papers, some photos of her and her handler, her collar and her leash, along with her favorite toy, the tennis ball. She played with the tennis ball during her overseas tours and when it got in really bad shape, the medics "bandaged" it with surgical tape and anything else that was handy since it couldn't be easily replaced. The customer wanted this integrated into the design but did not want a deep shadowbox. So we came up with this idea:smile: I had Gemini make a small acrylic case with a 1/4" flange on the bottom that I could hide under the mat. Since the piece was fairly large, we decided that we could cut the opening in the glazing acrylic for the tennis ball case to stick out from. Well, that turned out to be trickier than I thought it would be! I kept getting little feathery cracks around the cut and couldn't figure out how to fix it. So, after a few phone calls, we tried again. Long story short - we finally got it by using a board with a hole cut in it underneath the acrylic for stability and support, clamped together and then taped over the marked opening with masking tape to provide a little more grip on the front side and a straight edge to keep me from going completely crazy with the jigsaw! It only took several scraps, 3 large pieces of acrylic and a lot of cursing :mad-new: to get it right. The customer loved it and we were proud to do it!
