Here’s a Thingiverse thing I recently made from 
draftboard. I like these puzzle 3d models… wish I was skillful enough to design my own!
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Love the 3D puzzles! Looks great! 
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Maybe 3D Buzzles?
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A piece of paper, a straight edge and a little inspiration is all that is needed. Try something simple and work your way up. The trace feature works pretty good. Experiment.
You’ve got a whole pile of inspiration and lessons sitting next to your GF it looks like. Nice collection. 
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I’m sure you had a lot of fun putting this together!
I’m thinking no matter which way a person goes … designing, tracing, using a pre-made pattern … adding personal touches … it’s all going to be grand!
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Oop! Another word I need to adopt! 
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I love it! And also the photobombing by other lasered articles in the background. 
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This was one of our first laser projects as well. When we finished the bee my son said he wanted a praying mantis. I looked around and didn’t find a design that I liked so I just googled a nice side shot of a mantis and traced it in Illustrator (or you can use whatever). I needed to also come up with connection pieces and 3D the whole thing, but after ripping off some of the methods that the bee model uses, it came together really nicely.
I would still like to tweak a few things, but I’ll attach the file in case you want to see how it works. And here is the picture that I traced:
So I guess I’m just saying that I think you could design your own. It took 2-3 hours of tracing and tweaking, but it wasn’t as hard as I was expecting. Of course, it’s still not as good as the bee.
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One of the tricks I used for making something 3D lately was to just make a bunch of 3mm wide (approximately – whatever the material thickness was that I was trying to match) rectangles and then overlay them on the parts I was trying to draw. Cutting the rest of the rectangle wasted a little time and a little bit of material, but while I was prototyping it was much easier than combining the paths and then having to redo every time I wanted to move or rotate a joint.
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