When I was going through the 2" strip drawer, I pulled out anything that was less than the eight and a half inches I needed , and added all the bits leftover from cutting the strips down. From these I cut 4 and a quarter inch rectangles and 2" squares until they were all gone. (I cut the rectangles slightly larger than needed to allow for squaring up the ends and miscuts. )
Here are all my dark and medium bits paired up ready to sew.Don't I look excessively neat? I must admit I love arranging a stack of pieces like this, but unfortuneately there's no other area of my sewing room that displays this kind of order.


Stacking and spreading and bits on the floor, sigh. Just as well you lot can't see it.

I ironed the pieces, then cut the rectangles into 2" slices, rotated them and made 4 patch blocks. The squares I sewed into random 4 patches too, and made this pile.

I had thought of using them as the centre of these Puss in the Corner blocks, which would also use up the light strips from the drawer.

But they also looked nice set together as a postage stamp..
and how about the rail fence blocks as a border...?

Or as a piano key border...?
I like to play around with ideas like this, and the digital camera is great because you can record all the variations.I'm putting these in a project drawer until I can have a think about what I'm doing,but it was fun getting the bits to this stage. Much better to have a pile of blocks to play with than the full to bursting strip drawer.