I want to show the strength of associations based on the correlation among 11 items. Has anyone converted a correlation matrix into a figure? What package could be used for this purpose?
Have you taken a look at R (https://cran.r-project.org/), yet? There are packages that could be of interest:
The pairs function is part of the R basic packages
The psych package provides a function pairs.panels that should do the job. It can show coefficients, scatter plots, and histograms all in one plot. 11 variables might be too much for that kind of plot though.
The package CorrPlot might help here. It provides a few options that also look a lot nicer. But be careful with some visualizations since people have difficulties when intuitively comparing 2-dimensional objects in size (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/corrplot/vignettes/corrplot-intro.html).
The gclus package provides options to rearrange the variables so that those with higher correlations are closer to the principal diagonal. It can also color code the cells to reflect the size of the correlations.