Hi Rick,
If you'll give me a chance, I'd like to start over. My initial response to your question made me nervous that other builders were going to jump in and tell you what sort of strip design looks the best and what kind of strips to use where and so on and so forth. For some reason, probably just pure idiocy, I assumed that you would be tempted to build exactly what someone else described. This, of course, is not true (Thanks again Shawn). There are infinite ways to strip your boat, and the mere fact that someone is giving you their personal tastes would not sway you into building something that's not original. I do, however, still feel very strongly about the fact that you need to build your boat the way you feel it should look, not someone else. The main reason I feel so strongly about this is because I took some critisism while stripping my deck, and I went through the trouble of making drastic changes, when I should have just told the person to go piss up a rope, it's my boat. That's the best advice I can think of at this current moment.

The only other advice that you should consider, is that I've heard it is better to use light colored wood on the hull, at least the bottom of the hull, in order to hide scratches. This may be a good place for you to use some of the worse looking color variated strips, saving the best for the deck. This will also allow you to practice with the least desired strips on the hull, where they are less likely to be noticed.

Any of the ways you described using these strips, in your original post, would work fine. And don't think that just because some strips are glued together that its a final fit, you can always cut out sections or remove parts and pieces, until YOU'RE satisfied.
SMF