Iceblossom

Correct Susie, they can be brand new fabrics if needed but they need to be kept in sets.

A lot of my pieces were still great colors and usable randomly but just were an inch or so short to make a set.

Edit: Oh, I wanted to say something about my approach to scrappy versus one set of fabric or whatever, my real line is "the quilt we make depends on the fabric we have". I had a big bag of randomly sized pieces of hand dyed! I didn't really expect the issues with the dye not being set, or that I'd have to go to a much broader value range rather than have enough to keep true-er to the paint chips, or that in an entire strip of fabric I'd have an all yellow piece that should be red. That wouldn't be so bad except that yellow is my neutral.

I've certainly made scrappy quilts with far more identical repeats as well, and there is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes it works better to have "just" six blues, six greens, etc. And there is nothing wrong at all with a planned quilt of just one blue, one green, etc.

Before I developed my stacking/sorting techniques for dealing with fabrics, I'd start out by randomly putting fabric I liked together. That would go well for about half the combinations, and then the fabrics I rejected before were now "double ugly" and couldn't be put in combinations I was happy with but yet, no matter how hard I tried, the two fabrics I didn't want touching always ended up right next to each other in the final layout. Or if there are only 4 pieces of orange in the entire top, they end up within a square foot of each other.