Hey, hi, hello! And since I usually put that I am ~proficient~ in Spanish and French on my resume, I'll add hola and bonjour here for kicks.

I began my blog, Fig+Bleu, three years ago. In those three years, I have only been able to show you one part of myself. One that centered around food, the camera never veering away from the flat lays that I'd post on instagram. The past couple of months, I've began hinting at my desire to step back a bit, as writing was becoming less and less enjoyable to me. In three years, I pigeon-holed myself into only writing about thing I've baked, but often I'm sure you would see my writing would lean towards memoirs. And only tangentially could I connect it back to the recipe I was offering. It became an exercise in showing you guys the whole of myself, while trying to present only the beautiful work I was trying to create. And while I have been very fortunate to work with many brands, it's not the easiest thing to connect a brand of yeast to growing up poor or how much I love my dogs or my background in feminist psychoanalysis. And so I'd, begrudgingly, go back to recipes. Easy content to feed the arbitrary number of four posts a month I'd given myself.

But now, I'm happy to say I pulled the trigger and Fig+Bleu is just one facet of my past. Here, I hope to be able to use this space to write about my life outside of the kitchen. And while baking will still play a large portion of my content, I hope to also provide posts on my style of chicken raising and animal stewardship, my dogs, my fiancé, our house and land, and even a few posts on clothing or my love of stationery. In addition, I'll be writing a newsletter for additional content when the feeling strikes, so make sure to sign up on the left!

So, let me reintroduce you to myself: I'm Brett F. Braley and I'm a writer, baker, photographer, letter writer, dog dad, farmer, and accidental country girl.