Well, here's a file I created... it's several curves that were lofted together to make what you see. The curves are all in a group and are hidden and I believe I kept the history, so you can move the curves around any way you want to modify the lofted surface or you can reloft the curves of course. The Edges are smooth for the most part, but if you look closely on the top portion, you can see a line of distortion. This is because I couldn't get the curves just right to prevent the lofted surface from intersecting itself when it was created. If I did try to correct this problem, the curvature of the edge would become distorted... *sigh* I spent about an hour and a half trying different placement of curves, lofting, relofting, slightly rotating several of the curves, reoffsetting curves, and moving vertices of the profile curves in an attempt to fix this problem, but have had absolutely no luck at all... :\

Perhaps you can try your luck if you want, but I'm not sure you'll get very far. Just to let you know, the curve was created with three half circles being attached to each other and I shrunk them down for the top portion by EditCurves>Offset using any value from .1 to .2

bleh... sorry I couldn't be of more help. I'm going to try a polygon approach now and see if I can't get good results.....