Polymer plate Ai file prep

Dear gorgeous letterpress community-

Hopefully you can help me w/ a relatively easy issue I’m having. I’m brand new to letterpress & what little I do know, I’ve had to teach myself. I just finished my first Illustrator files to send off for my plates. I used various vector graphics from istock. I set the colour as CMYK spot colour 0,100,100,0. Apparently, there were many layers & the people making my plates had to go into Illustrator & fix all my files. She explained to me how she did it, but I am so confused & have no idea. I need to know & understand what she did so I know better the next time. Below is her email:

First of all I check the pdf in Acrobat - Advanced - Print Production - Output Preview. 
Here you can check off the spot plates and see what is left over. I then would open it in illustrator and highlight those particular images and change their elements to be a spot colour matching the rest. In the case of your plates some of the images were quite complicated and had layers of different lines so this took a little more attention to get each element perfect!

Can someone please clarify for me what to do in Illustrator to avoid this problem in the future?

THANK YOU
Autumn

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