atribututes where to begin?

I have just gotten my shop up and running -
wwww.stitchnframeonline.com
at this point I am trying as quickly as possible to learn EP and Atributes to get things rolling

no mods on either installed

this section is quite intimidating soooo
can someone point point me in the direction of:

each product will have a separte set of attributes - a large number of them also. Which I do not know how to organize or get up and running.

Example:
Knitting needles - Brand x has:
straights 13" in sizes 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,10.5,11,13 etc
straights in 9" in sizes 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10.10.5 etc

but brand y has a more limited sellection

floss 170 different colors
floss x has 460
floss zx has 320
and so forth

sewing needles are available in sizes 24,26,28 in gold amd [etites in 24,26,25,26,27,28.
well you get the idea. So my drop downs need to be different for each item. Ideas as where I should start? TIA

If all brands of knitting needles have straights 13", but some have a more limited selection of weights, you could make an Option Name Straights 13" (radiobutton or dropdown), with Option Values for all the possible weights. Then for each product, in Attribute Manager add an attribute for each name & value that product has available.
If you have several similar products, you can set up one of them and then copy its attributes to the others and adjust from there.

It would be good to sit down first and figure out the best organizing system for the attributes - should there be many attributes of a wide-ranging superproduct vs. fewer attributes for several more focused products?

some of these are unique but would be too cumbersome to put up individually - can you image going thru 220 colors of floss at 30 to a page?
Is attributes the way to go? Or is there something else?

Your options for this case would be to make a subcategory "Mfr X Floss" with a product for each color, or a product "Mfr X Floss" with attributes for each color. I presume this is something where customers will frequently want to buy one or more of several colors at once, so the subcat/products combined with a product listing layout set for multiple add to cart with qty boxes for each product would probably work best.

good idea -
I am thinking that the attribute is going to be the way - and if I group the floss colors and divide them among the product names so that I do not have a dropdown of 200 items.
Two Q? for your opinion

as a customer how many items in a drop down would be too long?

And what mod would be the one I would need?

Every product needs to have all of the attribute colors that it comes in - you can't "divide them among the products".

You might want to make a few color groupings so you don't have 200 in one dropdown (definitely too many!) I think a reasonable limit would be that the dropdown list has to fit comfortably on the screen, so however many items that is would be a place to start.

Do you have a plan for how to handle customers wanting to buy two of one color and one of another color? With attributes, you can select one color from a dropdown, or two colors if they are in different dropdowns, but you can only order the same number in the overall product.

I think this version of product choices would work better as products in a subcat. Some of the others would work with attributes.

You don't need any mod - attributes are built in.