I think you may be right, that's probably the best way to go about this. I'll just get rid of the stroke and do that. I liked the outline, but I can just make a duplicate of the spiro underneath and use outset to define the outline again. So to sum up: more objects. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. This is more or less what I am having to do, and I was hoping to find a way to make the second object something easier to work with and be the base for more. As is, it's going to require going in and manually deleting a lot of nodes after I've positioned my objects (this is jus...

Hey, I'm fairly new at this and I've found a way to get the effect I want but it involves converting the object to path and I'd really like to find a way not to. Or if there's some way to return to the original object for further editing the spiro spline, etc. http://i.imgur.com/ypfXB.png I start wi...