Great question. I've known about orphan blocks for years yet continue to let mine accumulate. I keep thinking "maybe this year" as some women in the guild have been making orphan block quilts and it doesn't matter if the colours match or the fabrics are ugly, the quilts all look fine in the end. But there are plenty of other ideas here beyond the orphan quilt that sound pretty interesting. And many thanks to Lena1952 for your description of how you lay out your blocks. You've made it sound possible. Last year my guild did a tin can challenge in which we all put a metre of fabric into an opaque container with our name on top. At every meeting we traded around and made two blocks to add to the container using some of the provided material. The result is a pile of blocks that have only one bit of fabric in common and can look pretty different. My container ended up with some different sized ones in spite of the instructions. Putting the blocks into a quilt seems like it will be like an orphan block quilt.