I’m not sure what other people do with their tiny scraps, but I can’t let anything go to waste. These are some walnut hardwood and maple veneer scraps that I turned into gift tags. (I didn’t have a banana handy, so I used a SIM for scale.)
So, serious scrap tip here. I try and make scraps cut out to be the same size. Not in an OCD way, but if it makes sense.
So I have (a) a lot of strips that are consistent 420mm long and 85mm wide. A lot of rectangles at 297 x 77mm.
The benefit of this approach is that I can make designs that will work to those sizes, instead of messing around trying to fit them into odd shaped bits of wood.
It also means they store well too, since they are all the same size they make proper stacks.
As a computer science guy, I use a greedy algorithm. I regularly cut lots of different shapes and I try to minimize the amount of scrap based on the shape used. If I must have scrap, I try to maximize the size of the scrap.
In my scrap photo, you can see the rectangle that I cut out for the word “Hack”. All I had was a narrow strip that was a little too small for most of the shapes I cut. And the circles used for “Joy” were the unused middle discs from some large rings I had previously cut.
(And yes, I have a jar full of little stars from the cut-out holes that are in need of a project.)
God grant me the gift of being able to throw away little bits of identical scrap that are really no use to man nor beast but I must keep because they are all the same.