Tom BihnInterview
Bag designer, CEO
Adapted from Tom Bihn's interview on Uses This, published 2 April 2013. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I love using Bic's writes-in-four-colors pens: each color can represent whatever it needs to at the time: lining/exterior, new/old, this/that.
The sewing tool I used for over two decades was a Consew 206RB, with a compound walking foot.
Basically a machine made for heavy work like sewing leather and upholstery -- an incredibly flexible tool (if you buy a new one today it's reputed to be not so great - buy a Seiko STH-8BLD instead.
I use a 13" MacBook Pro for all my 2D and 3D drawing.
For printing/plotting I use the Gerber AccuPlot 320 that's also used in the factory to make markers.
Design
I also use Adobe Illustrator a lot: PAD exports nicely in to Illustrator, so in refining small parts (or making graphics that include a pattern piece), I'm hopping between PAD and Illustrator quite a bit.
You know how some people are Photoshop people and some Illustrator people?
For 3D drawing I am just now (finally) learning TouchCAD.
Other
I work predominately in PAD System's 2D pattern drafting software.