My mom needed a laptop stand so I decided to make this for her Birthday tomorrow.

I really like how it came out and I love the interaction of the wave and the wood grain.

My process went something like this:
My mom's always liked Japanese prints (she grew up in Japan) and so I knew I wanted to do a Hokusai wave.

I found a creative commons image (http://nickpoint.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/the_great_wave_off_kanagawa.jpg) and imported it into Gimp. I adjusted the levels and threshold-ed it to make it just black and white. From there I played with it a bit in Inkscape using the trace bitmap tool. Eventually I ended up with what you see there.

I had a little bit of trouble with some text that I put on the bottom connector but I got it to work after I converted it to a path and exploded it.