Create Configurable Product From Simple Products (Magento)

Hi there, Our client has a Magento based e-commerce website that sells ribbon. The website has many 'configruable' products which contain many associated ('simple') products (in some instances over 50). These associated products contain variations of the ribbon including colour, ribbon width and ribbon roll length. Which is why it contains so many associated products, as for e.g you could have 'red' in 10 different widths and 10 different roll lengths (see screenshot ribbon-1 for the layout) What the client wants is the ability to be to add a new category dropdown menu items which are colour based (for e.g 'Red Ribbon', 'White Ribbon') and within these show only these colours of the ribbon. They are wondering, is there an easy way to create a product for these menu items from an existing product but only show the specific colour and also show all the widths and roll lengths associated with that colour? So they would want to take an existing configurable ribbon product but only display a specific colour from that product, which would also contain all the widths and roll lengths associated with the colour. For an example of the associated products please see screenshot ribbon-2 attached. We want to know the best and most simple way we can achieve this. Any questions let us know.