I vote you just start gluing shit together until you've got some funky blanks for the lathe. I buy a lot of turning kits from here, could give you some ideas.
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I've got a length of 4 inch PVC pipe for a mold that I fill with the scraps, then fill with epoxy. Once it cures I pop it out and slice the "log" in to coasters on the band saw. The cross sectional cuts turn out pretty interesting.

Could you try doing the epoxy thing with them? Place it all in a x by x rectangle with enough depth so you can cut it in half after you epoxy.
So create a flat cross section of the random wood and hope it looks cool.
If that makes sense?
I have a habit of gluing up long thin scraps into a panel and then making coasters or something.
I've wanted to make something like this for a while, but I never knew where to find such tiny scrap wood pieces like what you have. I certainly don't have the tools to make custom pieces, which seems like it'd be necessary. Unfortunately it looks like there are a ton of cheap "alleys" and even diy kits being sold now, so not likely to make any money even though they're cool.
For the lathe-end stubs, are they big enough to glue together for either bottle stoppers or maybe even small egg kaleidoscopes (with layers going up instead side-to-side)?
For the long ones, can any of them be used as pen blanks? Either top and bottom as separate pieces, or a mini-pen like this or this?
I've also seen where they trimmed down the outside of a pen blank like it was a pen (it had a top and bottom piece joined by metal), but didn't drill out the center. Instead, they drilled a small hole into the top and placed a soft alligator clip into the hole. It's to hold the end of a bracelet while you clasp the ends together.
I do recognize that each of these requires sourcing the metal, glass, etc, bits needed to complete the project, but these are the things that I thought of.
'I've heard a few people just throw them into baggies and sell/give to crafty folks, which I might do in the end. '
Yeah. Seems like they could be put to good use by assemblage artists, e.g. Kris Kuksi types.
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