I'm lucky that my machine loves all thread. Which is a good thing since I paid so much for it, it shouldn't be picky. I've heard on here alot of machines are though so I wouldn't buy large quanities of any certain brand until she finds out. I love Robinson-Anton thread and its only 399 a spool on Sears website. I also love Floriani, Jenny Haskins, Prencia and I have a few others. Anna Bove who sells designs has lots of specials on thread as well. When I buy thread the rule I live by is I buy a base color and then buy one or two in different shades, just enough difference for shading. Most designs that I've done normally have some type of shading involved so this rule really helps. I'm lucky that my Viking came with an organizier and it has a thread manager in it so that I can put in all my threads by color and company and print out an inventory list to take shopping. I also allows me to tell the machine to pull all of the thread color choices from my thread list instead of the ones it was created with. My machine will then go thru my list and list all of the colors from my list that closest matches the ones orginally intended from the maker of the design. I love that feature, saves so much time. Have her google search for free designs as well, there are tons of them out there and lots of free tutorials. This is such a nice thing you want to do but chose different thread colors, a few of each and chose different brands so that she can decide which ones stitch out the nicest. For FSL, if having a sheen isn't an issue I've even got the serger cones to work, this is great because its so much cheaper and if Im making baskets for the kids I don't want to spend a fortune on something that my kids will end up tearing up. She also needs not only thread but stablizers, different needles, normally emb needles of different sizes and top stitch needles also work great. Viking has tutorials on these things that tell you what they each do. Which would also be a nice gift; make her a notebook with different tutorials on stabiziers, thread,needles etc. rnkdistributing has a great workbook for stabilizers, what each one does and when to use it. You are a good mom and she'll get hooked so fast; I did