Hi Jeff, well there's not really just one way to do it, any way that gets the final job done is fine! :)

It can generally be convenient though to keep things more as solids, keeping things as a solid and then carving pieces off of it.

That tends to be convenient because you can carve a solid by doing a boolean with it just with a 2D curve that you have drawn, and the boolean between a solid cut by a 2D curve will give a solid result, constructing the sort of "side walls" of the 2D curve automatically as part of the process.

So probably doing an extrusion of the base outline to make an initial solid and then cutting off the top of the extrusion would be a good method.

See this previous post for an example of a couple of different methods:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4059.2

- Michael