I will buy tops from thrift stores and do what I will with them... sometimes I "harvest" them for their fabric. Other times I fix their issues. Sometimes I take them apart and rearrange them. I haven't yet cut up one, but I have started taking a bunch of orphan blocks that I intend to slice along a diagonal and re-do. It's funny, but I'm really looking/hoping to find a bunch of bad in some way 9-patches in particular.