Quipus have levels. Subsidiaries to these subsidiaries form a third level, and so on. Quipus are made of cords and spaces between cords. Larger or smaller spaces between cords are an intentional part of the overall construction. As well as having a particular placement, each cord has a color.
Color is fundamental to the symbolic system of the quipu.
Basically, the quipumaker designed each quipu using color coding to relate some cords together and to distinguish them from other cords. Additional cord colors were created by spinning the colored yarns together. Two solid colors twisted together gives a candy cane effect, two of these twisted together using the opposite twist direction gives a mottled effect, and the two solid colors can be joined so that part of the cord is one color and the rest of it is another color. For the most part, cords had knots tied along them and the knots represented numbers. But we are certain that before knots were tied in the cords, the entire blank quipu was prepared.