@Mary Solaas That life preserver was a perfect shape to do a cutout! For the text, I see that one is a Text object and the other is a Path object. What did you do between the two?
@Cassel - I used the text tool as I normally do and typed my text. Normally, the text shows up in the layer beneath and is not blank. To get it to show up in the layer underneath I used the pen tool. I've never had to do that before. If I wanted to use the vector tube script on a letter, I just typed the letter and it was a path. So, I'm not sure what happened this time.