If I understand correctly, you are looking to make a quilt that looks a bit like this:
So you have 28 strips of 40 inches available to you. Each row of the quilt will use 1 1/2 strips, therefore you will have 18 rows (using 27 of your strips).
I've tried playing around with colours and there isn't really a way to do it without having the same colour combinations, as you only have 4 colours to work with.
Here's a blank version of the above picture, if you save it and then open it in paint, you can have a play around with colours yourself :-)
Hope that helped a little bit!