I have an assortment from Metro Thread, polyester is what I use. I have a 10 needle, single needle, serger and various sewing machines. Works well in all of them. Those of you that have shredding problems you may need to clean out between the tension disks and in the bobbin area. Lots of dust can collect very quickly. Also make sure your tension is set properly.

All the guild members who embroider on their machines use Aurifil 50wt in top and a thinner thread in the bobbin. They have a separate group that meets just for embroidery and I go every now and then to see all the different machines they use and their results. They may come with different thread but get converted to Aurifil in no time. That's all I know about embroidery thread.

I have tried several different brands of thread and have had the best results with Madeira rayon threads. Also, It is the thread called for by Embroidery Library (emblibrary.com). I have been buying my thread online from allstitch.net. I buy the 1100 yd mini snap cones for $3.45 (price as of about a month ago). I've been choosing 10-20 colors at a time to place an order. Their shipping is reasonable.

I agree. Love the Metro thread. I bought the 64 thread set at a very reasonable price and have all of the colors I will need for a very long time.

you can add me to the list of those who love threadart.com and metroemb.com for thread and emblibrary.com for designs. Metroemb is on sale right now for $0.89 per 1000 meter cone which is a great deal.

I find that ebay usually has a lot of different brands and assortments. I have been buying there for years. Another place that has reasonable assortments is designsbysick.com. Good luck.

I started out with Sulky rayon as it is included with Viking products but wanted to use polyneon as most of what I was doing was to be washed and so I began using Madeira Poly and love it and now I also use Metro poly and am happy with that. I mix the threads according to what colors are available. I also change colors to suit me--don't always follow what the digitizer suggests. Secrets of Embroidery also carries designs from many digitizers.

Will the shop where you purchased give you free lessons to learn your new embroidery machine?

I (also) use metro thread. You can't beat their pricing. They had their 1000mm mini spools on sell $.89. That's right, 89 pennies. Might check them out, but people are right, my machine doesn't like some threads, but always runs when I
use Metro. If you are still confused about your machine, take a class or two. Most places have free intro classes when you
buy the machine. As for designs, try goggling free embroidery designs, you'll find hundreds. Hope this helps.

Other things I'd suggest:
Thread - I've been using Glide thread because it's what I have here. I have a few spools of Marathon but find it twists a lot, even on a thread spool placed away from the machine - it's only 2 of the 4 spools I have which is also weird. Both brands require the odd tension change to change between each other but that just goes with the territory if you want to be able to run whatever you want.

If you do want to buy some embroidery designs, see if the company you want to buy from has some free designs and stitch out one or two of them first to see if you like the quality the company puts out. One thing that I watch for is unnecessary thread jumps and thread changes. If I have to re-thread 6 times with the same color in a design, it's maybe not been set up the best. I've stitched out a few of the designs from designsbysick.com (They have random free designs hourly and daily. They also have a "membership" option I'm considering - It's thousands of designs available to you all the time rather than having to hunt everywhere. I wish UrbanThreads would do the same. I love their stuff but don't have the budget at the moment.) and have had no trouble with them. I think it was a design on the Cd that came with my machine that wanted black and white 4 separate times each in the same design. That gets tedious after 30 seconds of stitching then a request to change threads. ;) The other thing to watch for is good coverage - not too few or too many stitches to fill a particular area.

I also find I get nicer results if I cut the jump stitches before the machine can satin stitch over top of it and tie it into the design.