misery over attributes

[Phillie]

I am ready for the bin, I hope someone can help me. This is my problem. My client sells stained glass products. One product might consist of a central etched design of a certain dimension surrounded by a stained glass border incorporating 2 glass types, and customers can choose their glass from a swatch page showing what's available. So the list of glass types is the same for both options. Let's say there are 15 alternatives for the central design and the list of glass samples numbers 38 - that means that the total of possible permutations of these choices for one product will be around 24,000. I'm speechless. I've added Attribute Sorter and Copier, but to get one product to copy, it's still 24,000 entries. The thing is I just need to register this information on the order. It doesn't effect the price. I keep thinking there ought to be a way to just have the usual html popup menu for all three of the choices, and cookie that to the shopping cart page so it goes through to the credit info to the final email. Of course I know nothing about php. I can find and change to adjust appearance, and add contributions. The other thing I was thinking was that it could some how be possible to have the glass selections on a different table in the database, and call that info up from there instead of having it attached to the central designs at all. I did some experimenting and destroyed several pages. I don't know what I'm doing. Am I mad to think there's another way to do this?