Paint Pour - what to do with Leftover Strips

You've done your paint pour and let it dry.  You cut out the beads you wanted.  Now there are leftover painted strips of raw clay from the cut outs.  What do you do?

I don't like to leave anything painted sit in storage long.  I have not had good success in the past with that.  I also think it's risky to roll it up into a ball or other shaped bead  and bake it as I read that acrylic paint, if inside poly clay, can form weak spots as it sweats.

What I did instead was take the leftover sheet of paint pour raw clay strips and press some parts together to minimize space between them and cut off other parts so I could build on the design.  Then, I carefully placed the design on a backing sheet of black raw clay and kept adding strips to fill in the spaces on the sheet.  Once I had them all on the backing sheet to my satisfaction, I rolled that sheet on the thickest setting on my pasta machine and tried next setting and settled on the fourth setting to smooth the design in to my satisfaction.

Next I ran a raw clay sheet of conditioned black clay through the thickest setting and pressed with my hands the paint pour sheet and plain black sheet of clay together.

 I studied the design pattern trying to figure what type of jewelry item it would best serve.  I decided on bangles/cuff bracelets.  The pattern was larger so it would not have been as fab in earrings or even a pendant in my opinion.   I formed cuffs in different sizes and styles and baked them.

 After baking, I added another thin backing and mica powdered some of them.  I also antiqued the outside of two of them.  Here are the results.  P.S.  sorry I don't have any pics of design build stages.  I just get too into it to stop. he he

These were antiqued