Strip Quilt 2 (under construction)

I really would like to finish this quilt soon. I had 32 strips sewn together in pairs, and then it sat like that for months. Meanwhile I joined the Rhododendron Needlers' Quilt Guild in Walpole, Massachusetts, about 20 minutes from home. I haven't been in a guild for many years. We have a show coming up in March, so I pulled out all of my unfinished projects to see what I could do before then. I found, among the quilt tops, enough 3 inch strips to add one more stripe, the bottom bright orange one, which makes a big difference and improves the design. So, it was like, the quilt was telling me don't touch me until you find those strips, because I need them to be complete. Then about halfway through finishing the assembly, I felt like it was important to get the next project out of the box and lay it out on the floor. There was a mysterious reason, but I just thought, "Silly me, I need to finish the strip quilt, what was I thinking," so I left the next project out and kept working on what you see. At the top of the picture is the measuring tape (view from the upstairs balcony). I want to sew it right onto the batting rather than quilt it, so it had to be cut into a rectangle, and for that to happen, I had to make sure the diagonals were the same length. Then I measured the length and realized I was about five inches short with the backing, because cotton fabric shrinks in the wash. What could I do to extend the backing? The answer was immediately obvious. Use the fabric I had just dragged out of the closet for the purpose of finishing the next thing, which I was not about to do. It turns out that the border fabric for the next project matched the backing fabric perfectly (different pattern, same colors), and that after cutting the border pieces, I had just enough left over to extend the backing the right amount. So really, the fabric was in charge of the process. I was just some kind of servant.