The topic of thread (and needles) makes me ga-ga. I don't know if you've seen it but Stuart wrote an article about it for us: http://bit.ly/O1BnY . He also wrote two about needles.
Btw, if you are serious about learning shoe making, I recently connected with this guy named Larry who does this. He's interesting and a nice fellow. He also sells books. I have some of them already but since I haven't tried it out, don't really know which are good so I can't advise you. His site is here: http://bit.ly/j0slo
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