Hello, everyone, and welcome back to then again, the podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. I am Marie Bartlett, the director of the AdMa Ivester Education center here. And today I have with me Kayla Loebermeyer, who, with her mother, run the lifestyle brand under a tin roof. Thank you so much for being with us today.

I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much. And I'm looking forward to talking with you.

Yes. So we have been following each other on social media for, I think, a couple of years now. And I absolutely love your posts on Instagram and on YouTube. Your YouTube videos, they're so aesthetically pleasing. They are inspired by history, historical literature, some fantasy elements, and of course, the cottage core movement and your own experiences of living on a homestead in Iowa. So can you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, what it's like living on a modern homestead, and how you started your business under a tin roof?

Absolutely. Well, first I have to say thank you so much for your kind words. That's really nice. And I love seeing your content, too. I love following any historical costumers or people that wear historical fashion in their everyday lives. I just think that that's so fun and amazing and brave and just fantastic. Anybody that could sew, I love seeing it. So as far as starting under a tin roof, it really started off as a handmade business. My mom has always had her own business. I believe she started it when I was about two years old, and I'm 28 now. So it was her way, while she was staying home with me to use her graphic design degree and just be artistic in her own way, and ended up turning it into a small business where she would create artwork and sell it at small art shows. And at one point she did. I'm going to start rambling now. She did try to license her artwork, but it just didn't end up working out. There wasn't social media like we have now, so it was going in person to these huge conventions and hoping somebody noticed you and found you. When I came into the picture, I had just had my first child and I was 20, and I was working in restaurants at the time. And she wanted to try to get her business more online because we were seeing, like, Instagram was really picking up for small businesses and people were selling their things on Etsy, and she had already been doing that for a few years, but she just wasn't necessarily on social media side of it. So she knew that I really enjoyed blogging and reading other people's blogs. I was like, well, why don't we start a website and you can write on it about whatever you want to write about. And we can then sell our products. So that was kind of how we got started. And the first blogs I wrote did have to do with food. Now it's mostly all food, but it really started off as like an herbalism blog because I was really into outlander. So I wanted to learn more about plants and plant folklore and how that worked in our bodies. And I wrote about that. And then I also wrote about being a single mom. It just kind of tumbled from there into what we do now. Started a garden in the backyard. I did not grow up in rural communities. I was in the suburbs. Very convenience based living. Just your average, I'd say, american lifestyle. And we moved to Iowa. And where we live now, the town has about 1500 people and half of the population is amish. So that was really a huge culture shock for us. And it was fascinating to see people that were farming and living outside. Like, you could see the farms and the people walking around and tending to gardens and their animals. And I grew up in the suburbs, but it was a farming community still, but it was all conventional farms. So you don't really see a lot going on. It's just massive corn and soy bean fields, animals and confinement buildings. So it felt like we had time traveled a little bit. And that was really inspiring. So we thought, well, why don't we try growing a garden that can't be that hard? And we did that. And my dad built this really cool greenhouse in our backyard out of these reclaimed glass windows. And that was kind of what picked up our web traffic, was this picture of this greenhouse. And people just started really coming to our blog. And then magazines were starting to reach out and I started writing more about making herbal crafts. And then I got more into the food side of it. So, yeah, it has been a long journey, but that started in 2014, 2015 ish. So it's been almost ten years of sharing that publicly with the world.

That's awesome. I definitely when Outlander started, and I have never read the books, but I definitely enjoyed watching, especially the first couple of seasons where they just run around Scotland in the beautiful scenery. And then, of course, Claire is an herbalist and a nurse. And I definitely also bought a bunch of books about herbs and the history of herbs. And I'm like, I want to be like Claire and learn all of. So I definitely identify with that. It's so cool to see what herbs people used and how people ate when they are indeed growing from their own gardens. So how does having a garden influence what you make? Because now, primarily your books and your videos are about these recipes that you develop. And a lot of the things that you're making are from scratch. So can you tell me more about your garden and how that influences what you cook?

I think it has really influenced everything that I cook. The first garden we grew was 1300 sqft. So it was pretty big for a beginner garden. And it's not that my parents, so I was living, I still live with my parents and my husband and my three kids. We live in this multigenerational house. But at the time I was single mom and I was living with my parents. So we were all doing this together, which I think when people look at what I'm doing, they think it looks impossible. And I do have a lot of help. So that is great. But anyway, we had this huge garden and I didn't know what to do with all of it. It was really successful. That first year we did grow stuff. I followed everything by the book. I'm very much that type of person. I research everything because I want to make sure it all goes meticulously down the list. And we had all this produce, but I knew how to cook, but not super well. And it wasn't like from scratch cooking absolutely everything. So then that just really sparked a whole new path for me to follow down and things to be inspired by and look into. So that first year we had the garden, I didn't even realize that people canned things at home. I didn't know a whole lot about that. I had just learned how to make bread. A neighbor taught us how to do that. So that was really cool. Yeah, it sparked a lot of new ideas. So the garden itself almost has to influence you because you have to cook with what you have and what's in season and what you're harvesting. If you have anything, that also helps.

So obviously your garden inspires you with what you make and the recipes that you develop because of just what you have, which is just such an, I think, interesting way of looking at the world. That people have had to look at the world like that for hundreds and hundreds of years. And it's really only in the last hundred years that people can go to the grocery store and buy whatever they want at any type of season without it being frozen or canned, anything like that. I can go buy fresh strawberries in the middle of winter and that's kind of wild to think about. I think that's so interesting and already is a historically inspired method. But I also am so interested in how you developed your recipes and where you get your inspiration from, because I always enjoy reading about the inspiration behind it, whether it be from your heritage or a book or a movie or american girl dolls. So can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your personal history and your family's history and influence on your food that you make, and then also where you get some of your other inspirations for the recipes you create?

Absolutely. I think history has always inspired everything that I do, even when I wasn't necessarily dressing in history, bounding clothing, or even I'm getting more into historical, accurate costuming. It has not always been that way, but I feel like I have this deep desire to dive more into historical food ways, I guess I should say in my personal life because I don't have a deep connection with my family, at least my extended family, and they didn't really pass anything down to us. We don't have family recipe books or a lot of family heirlooms. And I think it's just been. I got started with it. Looking into ancestry.com was the big thing that opened that up, and that happened while I was pregnant with my first son, because I just wanted to have something to share with him. And I fully dove in, and I've done the dna testing, and whether people think that that's super accurate or not, it's just really cool to see. And it opened the doorway for me to look at other cultures that I didn't realize I was personally connected to. And I think that also goes hand in hand, even with the outlander side to it. Of inspiration is I was really curious, like, maybe I have scottish ancestry, and I do, and I didn't know that. So it was like, okay, well, maybe I should start looking into scottish foods. And that was the first inspiration for me to start writing food recipes on the blog was I started a series called Colonial Kitchen, and I was looking up 18th century recipes. That was probably my first step into starting writing about food history and recreating historical recipes with modern twists just to make it easier and approachable for people to cook at home. And I've been influenced by my scandinavian history. I feel like I'm looking more into that, just, like, within the last couple of years. And then a large part of my personal heritage is German, Polish, and English. So that's probably the biggest. I also have ancestry that's Dutch, danish, Swedish. So it's a lot of definitely european influences, and I just love reading about it. I think it's so cool. I think it's cool to see how the food there was brought here and changed with the ingredients that they had available in the US. I love it, and I don't even know why. It's definitely a passion.

For me, it's wonderful because food does have such a wonderful heritage to it that creating a traditional dish from one of the cultures that you've descended from, it's a way to reconnect with that culture in a really easy and in super tangible way.

Absolutely. I actually was talking with a friend about that recently, that it's one of the almost only tangible ways that we have, other than, of course, working with objects that we have left over or recreating those objects. But can we do that accurately? It's the same with food. Can we do that entirely accurately to what they had? And I love being able to play with it and make art from it to make it tangible, even though it's not necessarily 100% accurate. I don't think I ever will be. As much as I want to try.

To the historically adequate category, historically accurate, unless we build a time machine somehow is impossible. So I always like to shoot for accuracy, but I understand, especially in my own work in costuming, that it's not going to be like that. Unless somehow I build a time machine and go back and we get the silkworms who ate the certain mulberry leaves that had certain soil properties that then spin the silk in the certain way. So I was just like, yeah, I give up. Some level of historical accuracy. I give up because it's physically impossible.

You could do that. You could find those things be super easy. Yeah. Just very accessible.

Just a time machine. That's all I'm looking for. So the cottage core aesthetic absolutely exploded on the Internet in 2020, and it has remained incredibly popular. So, first of all, can you explain to our audience what cottage core is and how your baking style, clothing style, and essentially, lifestyle in general fit into this idea of cottage core?

Okay, I will try my best to describe what cottage core is. It's so many things now. It has so many subcategories to it now, but the overall theme is returning to this simpler life that's more connected to nature. Bracing, doing slower activities, so not necessarily buying into convenience, like making bread from scratch or planting a garden or enjoying, I don't know, walking around and being outside and taking a moment to step away from all of the, you know, in a nutshell, that is what cottage corps is. But then it's so much more. It's all of the clothing aesthetics and the home styling aesthetics, and then there are plenty of subcategories. I wouldn't even categorize myself as your standard cottage core image because I definitely borrow a lot from more moody vibes and darker colors. Dark cottage core. Yeah. That was inspiring to me because when I started my blog, it had a lot of historical elements to it, but I wasn't necessarily using that to style my photos or even style myself. And it would have been 2020, the perfect year for everybody to start doing all of the different things right. During the pandemic, I was like, you know what? I'm going to start wearing whatever clothes I want to wear. And I don't care what anybody thinks about it or what people are going to say. And I feel like I've become definitely more of a recluse after the pandemic than I was before. And I am definitely an introverted person to begin with, but I feel like I've just embraced it so much more being at home and I feel like I can wear whatever I want and enjoying the history side of it, of the cottage core style. I think that that is what just helped pick up what I'm doing because it was like, it's an inspiring movement to see other people just dressing how they want. And you can say that about so many different aesthetics. So this aesthetic really speaks to me and what I like and what my work says and what I'm already doing. So it just kind of fit. I think in a lot of ways, it feels like you kind of get to make your child self happy. I feel like this is how eight year old me would have really hoped I dressed like when I was older. And so I'm just embracing that and having fun with it. And it's things that I've always loved, even as a kid growing up. Like the dishes that I use, those were things that I was inspired by with film and books and art that I really liked. And I think it's just something in us that we know from an early age and we can't even explain why. I find that really interesting. I could talk about that for hours.

Why are we drawn to the things that we're drawn to?

Yeah, well, my own son is like that. He really loves World War II, and I don't know where that comes from. It's just he saw it, learned about it one, and now he's completely hooked on it and stuck, and he just loves it. And it's something where it's like he probably will love it for the rest of his life, and he won't even know why. So I find that really cool.

Just the things that we're drawn to. I know I've always was drawn to history, and I credit american girl dolls with kind of introducing my love of history and historical fashion and basically everything historical because they had the craft books and the cookbooks and all of these things to really build the world and the material culture of so many time periods. And I think that kind of goes along with the cottage corps movement in a way of, there's so many things. It's in clothing. It's in the way you decorate your house. It's all about the material culture of a different, almost fantastical time that is not quite any one particular time, but something that we kind of dreamed up. And I know there's also, like, hobbit core, and that's very kind of related ish. That's like Lord of the Rings, more fantastical themed of it, but also has a lot of elements of it. So it's fun to see how everyone has kind of taken cottage core and either gone in a more historical kind of bent to it or more fantastical bent to it. So it's been fun. I have definitely used the aesthetic to kind of create my sewing room at home because I enjoy it. I like antique things anyway. I had a bunch of antiques. I like the floweriness of it.

Right. It feels very freeing. It's like I can embrace all of the fantasy dreams that I've had, and so many fantasy films and shows and things borrow from historical. I guess if you're talking about decorations in general or home items, they're borrowed from history. So I feel like there's just all of these little connections under this large umbrella of the cottage core aesthetic. Yes. So it feels like you get to play a little bit as an adult, and I think that's something that we definitely need right now.

Absolutely. After the turmoil of the last several years, it's just like, I just want to play and have fun.

Yes. It's an escape, definitely. And I enjoy creating that world. And I think what you said, world building, is the perfect way to describe cottage core in general. But a lot of what the social media creators within this aesthetic are making are these little worlds to escape to. Oh, my gosh.

Sorry.

This game off topic again. It's just cool to be able to do that when we're not professional filmmakers or writers or anything like that. We're making art in a very new way, and it is like stepping into a historical fantasy that you didn't even really know that you wanted. So I have a lot of fun doing that. That is very fun to do.

Because. Can you describe to our listeners just where you are right now? Because you are in. If no one has seen your videos or your social media or your blog, they might not understand exactly how much of a world built, of a world that you have built, which is just fun or really a home that you've built for yourself, essentially, as well. Yeah, our listeners, a little bit more about that and the creation of your space.

Absolutely. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I was iffy on how I wanted to make my content a couple of years ago. Of course, I've had this blog for almost ten years, and I feel like I was really trying to go with what I thought would help me to grow in the best way possible. And when we were first starting our farm, because we moved here in December of 2017, and it's three and a half acre farm, and I was doing this blog, and I had social media, and I thought that it was just kind of like a little side part. I thought that what I wanted to do for income was start this vegetable CSA program and go to the farmers market. So if you don't know what CSA is, it's community supported agriculture. So we would have the customer, they would pay us for their vegetables for the entire year upfront, and then we would deliver those vegetables to them every week. So they were essentially supporting a small farm, paying for all of our seeds and equipment and everything we would need for the year up front. And then they would get rewarded with what we produced, which was fun, but it was also really hard to do. So we did that for a few years. And then I was cooking and writing recipes, and that was part of our CSA program, too. I was giving recipes out each week that would go along with what vegetables I was growing. It was once we got down to the nitty gritty of like, we're losing money doing this and losing energy, and it's just not sustainable, and what do we want to do now? And at first, it was like, maybe we should do a food truck, or maybe we should open a restaurant. And we started looking into that. I ended up getting my cookbook deal, the first one. And I kind of had to sit back and decide, do I want to invest in making this restaurant, which is going to be very costly here at our farm, or do I want to follow this cookbook path and just keep going with the blog and trying to make an income from that? And obviously, I went the cookbook route. And so we had this garage space that we had used as our store on the farm for the vegetables. Getting back to the point here, and we were going to turn this into the restaurant, and we thought, well, maybe we should turn it into a fake kitchen set and film with it and use that for social media and for YouTube and see how that goes. And it took us a while to figure out how we wanted to go about it. Did we want to make it super real, make it realistic for the viewer? Or did we want to kind of make it like a movie set to save costs and didn't really know if it was going to work. And so far it has worked. So, yeah, it was a garage on our property, and then my dad turned it into our store. So he built it, put all the drywall up and insulated the building, and now it is a studio kitchen, and it definitely has some fairy tale vibes to it. And it's where I film everything, all the recipes. And we're hoping this year, in 2024, to expand that area and make the whole studio feel like a little cozy cottage home and world, build out that space. So it's my lifestyle, but it's also, I feel, in a way, like a character that I've made, which I think kind of protects my own personal self, especially with how social media works these days. But, yeah, the kitchen, it's fully functioning, but it's not my home kitchen. My home kitchen is very dark and has terrible lighting and isn't this cool? So it's been fun to invest in and see what we can turn it into.

That is really cool. And I definitely understand the idea of this kind of, like, character you've created, because while we always want to be still ourselves, there is a little bit of separation where I have my historical bell, social media, and a long time ago when I created it, I decided I was never going to post my normal life on my public page. It was only going to be like me in costumes. And about the costumes, it's not about.

My day to day.

What did I have for lunch? I went and saw my parents kind of deal that way. Especially when you get to be such a large creator like yourself, with millions of followers across your various platforms, it protects your privacy.

Absolutely. And I think that audience like your followers and things can really blur the lines between your creator self and your personal self. I think that that definitely happens, especially with people that are personal bloggers and want to write about their personal lives or share about their children or their marriage or any of those things. And I was the same way. I made my list of, like, I do not want to write about these topics and share these things. And it can be difficult too, to even to restrain yourself from sharing those things too, because as much as, I don't know, I would say what I would categorize what I'm doing now as my job as a recipe developer, but also just entertainment. And I think that people still view a lot of social media creators. This is your real authentic life you're living every single day. And to me, it's more like I'm entertaining you and creating art to express things that I really love and I do personally enjoy. But this isn't necessarily who I am 100% of the time. I still wear average clothing now and then, and I still eat fast food sometimes and I drive a car. And I'm not living in the 18 hundreds fairy world. It's here for me to again, create a little bit of an escape to enjoy and go to, just as any fantasy creator would do. Yes.

And it's so nice to have those places to escape to from the real world and the modernity and all of the problems that come along with it. I am also incredibly interested. You mentioned your cookbooks. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got your cookbook deal and how do you even write a cookbook?

The ones that I've written have such a fast turnaround for my publisher. So, yeah, it's a lot of work. So the first cookbook is the Prairie Kitchen cookbook, and it is inspired by my personal heritage, and it's also inspired by where I live. So I'm in southeast Iowa, and I thought it would be fun to focus on the heartland states, so sort of the midwest, but definitely more going a little bit more west. So like Nebraska, Minnesota. I even have a couple recipes that are inspired by down south Louisiana. So it's that very center of the United States and the people that lived there. And it's definitely inspired to buy 19th century foods. I would say the most, maybe a little bit early 20th century, very early. So it's cozy comfort foods that are easy to make for a beginner cook and inspired by those historical recipes, but with more emphasis on flavor. So there's more butter, there's more herbs and spices. It fits our modern palate. A lot of the accurate recipes aren't incredibly flavorful for the time period. Very bland. So this book kind of ties in the classic comfort foods. It has some german and polish influences from my own personal heritage and that my family that moved to Iowa in the 1840s were swiss and german immigrants. So it definitely ties in and pulls from that, too. And then the second cookbook is the cottage core baking book. That one's coming out February 20 of this year. And that book is more whimsical. It's not as history based. It's a lot of fun bakes. There's flowers. And I wanted to really play around with making food art. I have a cake in it that is a bush de Noel, a log cake, and it has meringue mushrooms on it. And just playing with food to make it feel like you are kind of in this fairy fantasy world. There's some hobbity feeling recipes, medieval feeling recipes. It is a catch all for all of the different cores that are within cottage core. I just wanted it to touch on all of these different aspects that everybody that loves cottage core likes. It also has some french patisserie style because I wanted to play around with that. I wanted it to be like, pink and fluffy in some points and dark and moody in others. So it's just a really fun book. And I wanted to make sure that it felt like it was for everybody. Anybody could enjoy it no matter what your background was. So I think it's going to be good. And then this one's a hardcover, so I'm pretty excited about that.

Yeah. What are some of your favorite recipes that you've ever made or created? Oh my gosh.

I'm pretty excited for the new baking book. It has my croissant recipe in it, which I've been promising to share for like three years now and I still haven't done it. Life has just been extremely busy. So I do plan to share that one for free on our blog and showcase that one, probably on our YouTube channel, just because it's kind of complicated if you've never made a croissant ever before. So that one I'm very proud of. It turns out perfect every time. I love it, so I'm excited to share that. And then the other recipe from this book is the one that's on the COVID The pink lady cake. It's a pink lambeth cake, strawberry on the inside, strawberry frosting. And it's all made with real strawberries. Nothing artificial. So that one's really good. I'm very proud of that recipe, too.

Those both sound delicious, and I can only imagine how beautiful they are going to look in that cookbook. It sounds so, so good. And I'm so excited to see that I have your first cookbook and actually meet you.

I know. I was so surprised when you showed.

Up because it was not in my home state of.

No, no, we were in New York and, oh, my gosh, the Genesee Country Village and museum is so adorable now. It makes an amazing place. Well, it makes me want to just tour all the historical villages. I'd love to come see. Like, that would be so cool. I've been to colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown in Yorktown, but other than that, I've really only seen midwestern ones. So I'd love to see more of the east and west coast and even down south. I think that that would be. I am not. I'm not incredibly well versed with all of the various historical villages in the US, so I would love to see more of that.

I follow a lot of them on Instagram. I can send you a list if you need some.

Yes, please. That sounds great.

We've talked a lot about how you have various social media sites, you have a couple cookbooks coming out. Can you tell people, can you tell our listeners where to find all of this?

Exactly.

So all of the social medias, how they can find you, how they can.

Get your go to. You can search under a tin roof or go to underatinroof.com. And that's our name across social media. So we're on Instagram, Facebook, talk, YouTube, Pinterest. I share our videos to all of those places, but our main hub is definitely our website. You can get all of that information there. And this year, I'm really hoping to focus on YouTube. So I'd love if anybody who wanted to go watched over there. I'm excited to see what this year brings. I'm taking a break right now because 2023 was absolutely insane. But that is where we are. And, oh, our cookbooks you can purchase on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere books are sold. They're all linked on our website. It makes it a little bit easier. Again, that's the big hub of where you can find most of our information.

Yes. And then you can go from there and find the social medias or avenues that best fit with whatever our listeners are looking for. Do you have anything else you would like to share with our listeners or plans for 2024? Things they should keep an eye out for?

Sure? Yeah, I'm looking forward to in 2024, I'm going to be putting more focus on our blog again. So for the last two years, I've been working on these cookbooks. I guess I should say more three years working on both of the cookbooks and they took out so much of my energy. And then just with how social media works now, it's so video focused, which I really love. That was actually before I started doing this, I was going to go to college for filmmaking, for screenwriting and directing, going to go to Tribeca Flashpoint Academy in Chicago. I was super excited to do that. I had a baby instead. So it's been a fun way for me to work creatively with that again. So while I would love to say that I want to focus more on my short form videos, I'm going to take a little bit of a step back because it was so much, it definitely led to burnout. And I want to just go back kind of to making slower content, making YouTube videos, having more artistic freedom with that. I feel like with Instagram like reels or TikToks, it's very much you just have to be repetitive over and over again for the content to be seen. So I miss writing my blog and I miss focusing on really making recipes that are beautiful and they work and are absolutely delicious. Not that the recipes don't work, but I just don't feel like I took a lot of time in styling them within the last couple of years. So I want to create content on our website that looks just as nice as it does in the cookbooks, which is where most of my energy focused, which is good.

Forever.

Yes, it's a forever piece. So I'm excited and I hope people that have been following along with us are excited to see the blog kind of get a nice refresh for the year.

So hopefully our listeners are inspired to go create their own recipes that they can use your cookbooks or go to your blog and your website to find those. And if you have not already decided and are already typing under a tin roof into your search bar, go ahead and do that because you need to see how beautiful all of these foods are and I can only imagine how delicious they taste. I still need to make some of your, I have them like earmarked. I'm going to make this one. They are beautiful and just look absolutely scrumptious. So be sure to go look at those, get those cookbooks. We will, of course have the link to the website down below in this podcast description as well as links to those books. So thank you so, so much for being on our podcast today. It was absolutely delightful to get to talk to you again.

I know, it was so nice to actually have a conversation. I feel like it's always rushed or it's via Instagram so this is really, really nice and I had such a blast. Thank you so much for having me. Then again, is a production of the.

Northeast Georgia History center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by Andrews Gilles.

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