The Travel Cigar Humidor - UPDATED

UPDATE June 2023

The Achilles' heel which was that croocked zipped pouch has been redesigned from scratch.

11 (eleven) prototypes and 4 months of work later I came to a conclusion with it.

Here made in Forest Green ostrich.

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The story goes like this.....

In 2021 a cigar aficionado approached me to help him re-dress his $20 humidor bought on Amazon which became kind of ragged, being made of cheap faux leather.

The same as when I made my first leather bag, I initially resisted the request thinking that the guy can simply just buy another humidor, one of a better quality. Without knowing him personally at the time, I also explained him why I think this is not a really good idea, financially speaking. After he explained me his intentions I understood and accepted working on this project.

As I usually do with any brand new project I work on, there is a researching stage in which I do my best to understand the different aspects of the problem, mostly the ones that are not obvious at first sight. And this project was plenty of them.

The whole process lasted a few months, which while I deconstructed and reconstructed the object, first in my head then on my bench. And I came up with this thing...

It was the first prototype.

This year, in the last two months I made another one which looks like this....

There are some obvious differences here. Amongst them the pouch - used for the cutter and the lighter - is made on a piped structure, different than the lose pouch on the black one. Although it is better than the first one, it still needs further development because it has to submit to the cylinder in a way that should leave the zip straight. Any ideas here are highly welcomed!

The more subtle differences are:

- The padded body which offers a nice touch to the hand and resolves the overemphasis of the turned edges of zip area which strikes through at the black one.

- The end caps at the black have been stitched through. That was a real pain in the...fingers. So I decided to use a different approach at the brown one: apparent stitch and industrial contact adhesive. I'm really curious how it will stand the test of time. For the next one I will probably do box stitching.

- The stitched in long piece on the back that creates the hinge. It's literally impossible to stitch this by hand on the body of a cylinder of 75mm diameter. It's almost impossible to do this on machine either. On the original Chinese humidor that piece was stitched on the body on one side only. That's why I didn't do it at all for the black one. Well, actually I did it, but sporadically, here and there, as you can see. It's still lose though. So I had to come up with a solution for this problem. And I found one which is still hand stitching on all its length, but I won't reveal details about how I did it as it was nerve wracking to me for a good amount of time finding that solution. Any guess though?

- Under the pouch there is a proud on the surface stitched in banner which, at the black humidor as the original one, was meant to offer a hidden seam with the body for the base of the pouch.

For the brown humidor I kept this piece just for design purposes but leveled it with the rest of the body.

For me it was an arduous one, and it still is until I'll be able to resolve all the remaining issues which are stitching the end caps in in a convenient manner and an adequate pouch for an impeccable appearance.