Can anyone help? – Problem with a Singer 99-13 (1931)
As the title mentions, I have a 1931 Singer 99-13 that I love. I've been using it fairly regularly recently while installing zippers into some old needlepoint kneelers at church, and it has been working like a dream, as usual. I last used it a little over a week ago, then didn't use it for a few days because I was waiting for a couple of things to be delivered.
When I sat down to it yesterday, something had clearly happened to it; from the top, the needle thread looked normal, but when I flipped the fabric over, it looked like a rat's nest. I sewed a few stitches on a bit of scrap fabric so I could take some photos to attach; the first is the top of the fabric, second is the bottom, and third is the bottom after pulling the bobbin thread out (it pulled straight out, with absolutely no resistance). It's clearly the needle thread that is all loose on the underneath side, but the tension on the needle thread is all the way up.
(I don't know if this part is relevant, but:) I had been leaving my machine at the church because I've been working on some really long kneelers and simply didn't have the space to do that at home. When I dropped by the church on Wednesday evening, I noticed that the spool of thread was no longer on the spool pin, and was somehow bizarrely unwound – probably 8-10 feet of it had been unspooled and tangled up, but then there was a good amount still wound around the spool, and then another very long section that had been unwound, and it was all knotted up into a real rat's nest. I have no idea what happened to it, but I got it all straightened out and unknotted.
My first thought was that maybe a kid found it and messed with it – that would explain the spool of thread, at least – but the machine was still unplugged, exactly where I'd left it, and nowhere near an outlet, so surely, they couldn't have done very much.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on with my machine, or what I can do to fix it??
EDITED TO ADD: While the machine is still at the church, when I'm not actively using it, it is now in a locked closet, which itself is in a locked room, so there's no chance anyone else can mess with it.