Hot Air Balloon Urns

This collection is for the pilot or the crew member who was out in the field before dawn most weekends of the season. It is for the person who finally took the ride after thirty years of saying they would, or the one who stood in the cold every year at the festival for the mass ascension. Perhaps they were the one who pulled the car over and called everyone outside whenever a balloon drifted over the house.

Ballooning happens at an hour almost nobody else is awake for. It is found in the still air just after dawn, where a crew works to pack everything away before most of the town has had breakfast. A flight is a matter of cooperation, with four or five people working together to give one basket a quiet morning.

It is a craft that cannot be steered, only risen and lowered into a wind going where you want. The people who do this tend to be calm about a lot of other things too. You might remember them as someone who moved through the world with that same steady composure, trusting the winds they could not change.

For everyone else, ballooning is the act of looking up. A balloon over a house stops whatever was happening in that moment. They were the one who made you stop and look, and their memory continues to do so.

The balloon is engraved into the metal of each piece. These aluminum urns are finished in a range of colors or in a hand-applied enamel with silver bands. They are offered in full-size, sharing, and keepsake sizes, so a family can choose one piece or several.

We can engrave a name and dates directly into the surface with a two-tone effect. This allows their name and the years they lived to become part of the piece itself.

On September 19, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers flew a sheep, a duck, and a rooster from Versailles to see if anything could survive the journey. The flight lasted eight minutes and covered about three kilometers, featuring a sheep named Montauciel, which means climb to the sky.

Two months later, on November 21, 1783, Pilatre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes made the first free human flight. They traveled twenty-five minutes over Paris at around nine hundred meters, coming down near the windmills at the Butte-aux-Cailles. For a family, the design on the urn is the thing that made the person stop and look up, and everybody they called outside to see it.

Source: Wikipedia, Montgolfier brothers

If the person you are remembering possessed that quiet composure or always made sure others were watching the sky, then this design will read as theirs. A sibling or a friend will see the balloon and recognize the way they lived.

The decision of how to honor them belongs to your own memory. A family sees the stillness of a dawn field and remembers the mornings they spent together watching for the first balloon of the day.

Our guide to selecting the right size urn