This might be more than you want to know at the moment, but I have learned a lot from this website: http://www.superiorthreads.com/education/ about thread and the explanation of how needles work was a life saver. Solved a few problems for me. I am really pleased with the thread from Connecting threads and if you wait for the sales, it's a good price. I had lots of lint from C and C from Walmart when FMQ, but for piecing, it seemed to be just fine.

Maybe someone else mentioned it earlier and I missed it, but do not use cotton hand quilting thread in your machine. I was told it has a coating on it to ease it thru fabric and that same coating tends to gum up your machine.