It's called Resource Provisioning, not shopping

What does it take to do home machine embroidery? Beyond the embroidery machine, it takes supplies and knowledge.
Well, it turns out I didn't have enough of either, so I had to lay in some resources. In the meantime, my iron started causing me trouble, so I decided to replace it as well with one that doesn't produce steam.
Here are the results.

My thread choices came from a Mettler product line offered by quilt artist Pia Welsch. For her machine quilting classes she designed a set of threads along the color wheel. She even has light, medium and dark versions.
The silly thing was, all of her sets only com in 200 meter long spools. That's nothing when you talk about embroidery patterns, which can consist of thousands or tens of thousands of stitches.
So I set about composing a set of threads from Fadenversand. I tried to match similar shades to those of Pia's, but in the 800 meter spools instead. Those are the threads in the picture. Nice, huh?
Those two books are great as well, but I'll tell you about those some other day.