When I briefly traveled to India on my way to Thailand, I took a cooking class with a guy who also ran a jewelry store from his house, and after the class he showed me around his shop and gave me this beautiful lapis lazuli stone as a gift.
I kept it in a drawer for way too long because I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I put it on my desk for a while, and looking at it every day eventually gave me a good idea.
The stone’s texture and shape reminded me of those big iridescent beetles. I thought it would be cool to 3D print a “body”—legs and a head—for the stone.
Rather than find a detailed beetle model online and modify it to fit the stone, I designed a low-poly model from scratch so it could stay basic and not visually distracting.
I added those thin vertical struts on the sides and back to grip the stone and hold it in place. But I wasn’t familiar enough with Xometry’s materials, and the plastic I chose was too weak and bendy to serve that purpose. Rather than sink more time into re-printing, I just snipped off the struts and placed the stone on top of the model.
I didn’t want to glue it, because I might damage the stone trying to get the glue off later; lapis lazuli isn’t a very hard stone. But I’m happy with it. Anything beautiful is worth putting work and thought into.
I’d like to revisit this project someday—get more pretty stones and make different “bodies” for them, and find the right material to use so they can snap on and off cleanly.
