Video transcript -
Thomas Yates: Hi, I'm Thomas Yates. I'm from Spokane, Washington, and I am a cyclist. My life kind of revolves around bicycles, so I work at The Bike Hub downtown after I used to work at a string of corporate jobs that eventually just turned to a paycheck towards the end. So I decided I wanted to do what I wanted to do instead of what my parents wanted me to do. So I decided to get a job at the bike shop and I've been happy ever since.
Kind of as a side thing, I started making bags for bikes to be able to carry things with you. This one, so this is the one that I made for myself; holds all my things. It started out with me just being too cheap to order a custom bag, so I figured out how to make it myself, which was trial and error. I like learning things. I didn't know what I was doing.
Hey, honey?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Thomas Yates: Can you show me how to work the bobbin thing?
I made the first one, and that one had lots of room for improvement, so then I made another one, and then I made another one, and then eventually I kind of figured out what I was doing. Then they started to hold up and look good, so then I started making them for other friends. My favorite projects are probably when I can take something that's essentially garbage, I guess you could say, or something you were going to throw away, and repurpose that.
A buddy in town here, he actually had an old pair of Patagonia pants that he wanted to turn into a little bag. So I've hacked up the pants and cut pieces down, done a little bit of sewing. So it's turning it into just a little frame bag that'll go there. So there'll be a zipper on this side and then a little stash pocket on the other side, so it'll be nice; kind of reuse the pants, and then it'll have this Patagonia logo on it, too, with the 32 on there so everybody knows it was a pair of pants at one point.
It's a lot less stressful being at the bike shop. It's nice because I can leave at the end of my workday. I can go home and I can spend time with my wife and actually pay attention. And I can go down to my basement and that's kind of like my zone, because all my bike stuff's down there. The sewing machine's down there. I have music. I mean, the sewing machine, I can plug that in and it empowers me to be able to make anything I want.