Laminate on stairs - what to do with a tiny gap?

I've just started putting laminate flooring on my stairs. I got the riser in place for the first step and started on the tread. I figured out where the stairnose piece needs to sit, measured that, and then used the width of the laminate pieces to see how far a single board would go and what would be left over. It only left me with a gap of 3/4" to fill. I could take a board of laminate and rip it lengthwise to fit that space - and that's what I expected to have to do - but now that I know it's such a tiny space, I hate to waste a whole board to fill that last 3/4" of an inch. I wouldn't mind if I could cut a bunch of those filler pieces out of a single piece of laminate, but of course, then I won't have the interlocking edges on most of those strips. What other options are there, besides wasting a whole piece of laminate flooring to utilize only a 3/4 inch strip of one side?