Tropical Butterflies - Mixed Colors - Gourd Ornament
This great gourd showcases a kaleidoscope of beautiful butterflies! Marvel at the wonderful, hand-carved and burned details as this gourd hang from your Christmas tree.
Designed and hand-crafted by artists in Peru, our fair trade gourd ornaments bring a modern flair to a 4,000-year-old traditional hand-carving and burning technique. These ready to hang ornaments average 2”-3.5” tall. Details will vary as nature and the artists intended.
An Ancient Craft
A living tradition more than 4,000 years in the making.
Long before gourds became Christmas ornaments and keepsakes, Peruvians were carving and decorating them for both practical and symbolic purposes.
Archaeological evidence from Huaca Prieta on Peru’s northern coast shows gourds used as bowls, bottles, dippers, fishing floats, and other everyday objects as early as the third millennium BCE. Some fragments were also carved and decorated with pyroengraving, showing that gourds had already become a surface for artistic expression.
Other archaeological discoveries reveal their deeper symbolic significance. A carved and painted gourd fragment dating to about 2250 BCE depicts the Staff God, one of the earliest known representations of a major Andean deity.
Remarkably, closely related techniques continue to this day. Artists still carve dried gourds by hand and use heat to darken and shade the surface, carrying forward an ancient Peruvian tradition with roots reaching back thousands of years.
Sources: American Museum of Natural History archaeological research at Huaca Prieta, published 1949; archaeological research on early Andean decorated gourds; Peru Ministry of Culture documentation on mate burilado, 2013.
Why Fair Trade Matters
For our team at Lucuma Designs, Fair Trade is more than a business model. It's a way of life that guides our daily decisions and inspires us to keep learning and evolving.
It lives in the relationships we've built over many years with the artist partners we know personally. Together, we've grown through trust and a shared commitment to building sustainable livelihoods and a better future for their families and communities.
Fair Trade is about much more than creating jobs. Through creative collaboration and by encouraging our artist partners to continually refine their craft and excel at what they do, we've built handmade collections our clients have come to trust year after year.
Ultimately, Fair Trade reminds us that business can be a force for good when it's guided by shared values and meaningful connections.
Lucuma Designs has been a proud member of the Fair Trade Federation since 1999.