Homestead Living with Katie Metka & Girls

We recently had the opportunity to visit Katie Metka and her family on their farm in Missouri. Katie is a mother of nine girls and one boy, known for her gorgeous, textural black and white photographs of her family's life on their homestead. Together they run the family business, Laberia Farm, named after the region in Albania where her husband Oresti was raised. We traipsed around their land, meeting their animals, discussing motherhood, their works-in-progress+dreams for the future, and taking photographs of her girls in their favorite Wilder pieces. 

It’s hard to pick one certain moment in my life that led me to photography.  It was a mixture of things, but the interest was there from the beginning.  My father was an amateur photographer and also a high school teacher, before I was born, so he had access to the school’s dark room and could develop his work.  I remember pouring over his photos of people I didn’t know but being mesmerized by the photos and wanting to know more about the people and what was happening in the photos.  Same when I would visit my grandparents, my favorite activity was to look at all their old albums from the 30s and 40s.  

So when I was in high school, I got to take my first photography class where we learned all about black and white photography and how to develop our film and photos.  I was sold right away.  I loved every minute of it.  Then later in college, I went for a BFA in studio art but took several B&W film photography courses which just furthered my love of photography.  I remember sitting around the table with my class and everyone was showing what camera they had for the semester.  Our teacher was having everyone switch to manual so they could really learn the ins and outs of the camera.  I had my dad’s old Pentax from the 60s, there was nothing automatic about it!  Haha!  So I learned everything on the camera the manual way, including how to focus.  I think that really helped me understand the workings of the camera.  

So how did I develop my style?  Every exposure to photography in those years was black and white film.  That is my first love.  There’s just something so special to me about a black and white photograph.  It’s not about the colors going on in the photo, but the expressions, the textures, the emotions.  I never thought I’d switch to digital.  It wasn’t until my second pregnancy that we bought our first dslr and I just wanted my photos to have a black and white FILM look so it took me years of fine tuning it till I was satisfied with my look.

I think my favorite part is watching their creativity and artistic side develop, to see them get lost in their play and worlds they created.  I don’t think it’s necessarily specific to daughters, but it’s just that I only had daughters for so long.  I do love that I get to help shape nine young ladies character as they grow.  To model a love for one another, a love of others and a love for God. As a child and as a young lady, I always wanted to be a wife and a mother, it was always a deep desire.

 

I think the most rewarding part is making it through the struggles, the crop fails, the animals that struggle to thrive, to finally make it on the other side and have some success!  Not that we have it all figured out, but it feels like we inch forward each year and things get better, we gain more knowledge or experience and crops and livestock do better, or the we see the pasture improving, that’s really exciting too!

The plan was to raise Idaho pasture pigs and ship pork to customers across the country and to also grow and sell flowers locally.  Well, we saw that that was taking some time to be ready and to get everything in order was taking some time.  And our desire was for my husband, Oresti, to be home and all of us working together so it was either he needed to go find a job off the farm, until the pork was ready, and we wouldn’t see him hardly at all OR we could try to make it work making the wooden items and linen items that we already were making and see if they would sell.  Amazingly people loved them too and the website took off!  So that was over a year ago and in the meantime we’ve also added our pork boxes and flowers seasonally!  So really it was that deep desire to live out each day together as a family, which is one of the reasons we homeschool too.

Oh thank you so much.  Really, besides getting a DSLR (buy used if you need to), make it a priority to just take one photo a day.  Of course you’ll probably end up taking more, but if you make it a personal goal of taking one photo a day, you will be amazed at your abilities after 365 days.  You will see so much improvement!  Don’t worry about setting anything up, just capture what’s in front of you.  When I started doing this more, at first I had to gently remind my kids to keep playing and don’t pay attention to me.  After awhile of reminding them, they hardly noticed me when I would join them with my camera.  They will get used to it.  And as you get in the habit of taking your camera out each day, you can start to pay attention to noticing where the light is hitting or coming from, you can start looking all around the frame of your viewfinder, do you want your subject centered or off to the side, etc. . . Little by little your eye will improve and you’ll be able to capture those moments you’ve been wanting to.  

I learned to sew by hand when I was very young, my mother had me and my sisters make doll quilts that we sold on consignment in a local doll shop.  It was such a fun project!  I loved sewing but it wasn’t until I had my firstborn daughter, that I tried to make clothing.  I would look in shops and see these beautiful, old fashioned cotton dresses for little girls that were quite out of my price range, so I was determined to recreate them on my own.  Patterns confused me, so I learned to make clothes just by trial and error, taking some things apart so I could see how they were constructed, and I just worked at getting better!  I also wanted my daughters to wear natural fibers and now they prefer it too, so sewing is often a necessity.   My love of linen began sometime in the last 8 years or so, we were living in Texas and I just saw how comfortable it was in the heat.  I even went as far as trying to grow my own flax one year, haha!  It was a beautiful plant but I never spun it into linen.  But there again, I started looking around at linen clothing and seeing that they were out of our price range for our large family, I decided I would just start sewing for all of us and I taught myself to make simple dresses.

Well, besides the Black Walnut cutting boards and Garden Dibblers that my husband makes, we’re very excited to soon be offering Dutch Style Cheese Presses!  Making cheese has been one of my favorite activities on the homestead.  We have 3 milk cows (though you don’t need that many or even one!  You can make cheese with store bought milk if you had to) and several dairy goats and I love putting away wheels of cheese for us to eat in the winter.  The Dutch Style Cheese Press makes the process sooo much easier, it is by far my favorite tool for pressing cheese.

So besides my husbands woodworking, I’m very excited to continue on with my quilt block aprons but also incorporate my love of quilt blocks into pouches and drawstring bags/purses!  I have plans to incorporate them into some sweet children’s play clothes that are exactly what I make for my own children to run around in, in the summer.  I’m hopeful they will be much loved by other families as much as my children have loved them.