Then try to draw curve. In this mode everything you make is relative to the surface. Make some decoration curves. Make sure you create closed shapes. That closed shapes will be extruded later. When done press make live again to exit live mode. Then duplicate that surface, and move it down a bit to define the depth of decorations. Hide that second surface.

Then go to edit nurbs/trim tool option box. In tool settings choose keep or discard. Keep means that you select parts of surface you want to stay and discard means you select parts you want to delete. Select parts you want to keep/discard. It’s also good to select same surface couple of times. Sometimes trim can behave strange, so couple of undos might be needed.

After trimming I got this. Nice? Notice that trims in viewport don’t look very good. In rendering they will look right after couple of adjustments, but about that later...

Now select lower surface and hide the upper.

On it, make opposite trims.

Now select both surfaces, press f8 to get into component mode. In the component icons choose trim edges.

Select pair of edges and loft them.

Go pair by pair. Sometimes you can get strange twisting. To fix that select one of trim edges and go to edit nurbs/duplicate surface curves. Then go to edit curves/reverse curve direction. Now loft trim edge and reversed curve. Works eh?

Also, there’s one faster way to extrude all those edges. Select just the top ones, and go to surfaces/extrude option box. In style choose distance, and set axis to Y and set length to distance between two surfaces.

Then go to rending menu set. Go to render/set nurbs tessellation option box. Make divisions higher to get smoother surfaces. Of course if you have Renderman, you don’t need to worry about that.

So when rendered in Maya Software

Now one very great trick. For handle I just created cylinder. Create two locators, parent second to the first. Also make first be in the center of the cylinder and place second a bit further from radius.