Hello and welcome to Butterfly Ranch Creations!
I was born and raised a city girl my entire life with NO desire to have anything to do with the country life. My husband always wanted to own land but me, I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
However, two years ago I got a message about some ranch property for sale by Strawn, Texas from someone I know. It wasn’t something that appealed to me but I sent the link to my husband anyway. He said “That’s a great price”and I had no idea if it was or wasn’t but the ONLY selling point for me was it had a pond, which meant I could go fishing. We took a tour, which was more of a hike, of this15 acres and LOVED it so we bought it! I had no clue what I wanted to do with all of this land but I did know I loved all the topography, creeks, flowers, trees, birds and wildlife. With all the flowers came ALL the butterflies. There must’ve have been hundreds of them and I thought I had for sure just bought paradise. With all of the butterflies pollinating and flying around on the land, we decided to call our little piece of Texas “Butterfly Ranch”.
Almost a year later, the land next to us came up for sale and I told my husband “I think we should buy that land as well so nobody is next to us”. He looked at me like “Who are you??!” but we bought it so we now have 34 acres of country that I wanted nothing to do with in the first place.
The story behind my paper making is one that kind of evolves. I had some people from the USDA office come out to offer some technical assistance for growing and harvesting milkweed, which is the plant that Monarch butterflies eat. As we went around the ranch, one of the people showed me a Cochineal bug, which can be used to create red dye. Cochineal bugs live on cactus and you may not have ever known what it was even though you’ve seen it. It’s the white stuff you see growing or living on cactuses. Cochineal dye has been around forever but I had never heard of it. I looked up the history of it and the dyeing process that has been used since Ancient times. As I’m watching these videos, a video on making paper popped up as well. I was intrigued with the whole process of making paper with recycled paper and thought I need to try that! I grabbed the blender, junk mail and my paper shredder and was hooked from my first piece! The softness of the paper, its uniqueness and deckled edges is what is so intriguing about each piece of paper.
A few months later, I was out at the ranch and thought about those Cochineal bugs again and wondered if I could make paper with it since you could dye everything else with it. Guess what, you can! I did more research on natural dyeing and found out you could use black beans, avocado stones (seeds), yellow onion skin, turmeric and other natural dyes. Buying Butterfly Ranch and the research on Cochineal is what led me on my journey to making paper and cards to hopefully brighten someone’s day one sheet at a time.
Thank you for stopping by and looking!
Amy Maddux
