Black and white and words all over

It's time to make sentences out of my words. I've been building words for my Words Fail Me project for a year now, and I'd like to get this to a flimsy stage before I head off on a quilt retreat this weekend. (I can hardly wait. Making quilts, admiring others' work, and eating without cooking it first is so great.) Yesterday I laid it out in a sort of random log cabin style, with an oasis of calm in the middle. I didn't get all the words in this shot, but you get the idea.
Here's another go, with the lights and darks separated. It's not quite there yet either.

I've tried designing it with Wordle and those designs look great on paper, but are harder to translate to fabric. I definitely need some white space. I don't mind if the words are a bit hard to read (that's sort of the point) but I'm not sure exactly where to go with this.

So I put the words away for a bit and started cutting strips off my B/W collection to make a table runner or topper with matching tea cosy for a prize draw for my son's school. It looked too dull, so I put some orange/pink/yellow prints inside the frames for a bit more fun. What's a good size for a table runner?