Missed Connections

Recently, I discovered Sophie Blackall's Missed Connections, an absolutely magical, ingenious blog; it's a little bit PostSecret, a little bit Found, but mostly something altogether fresh and new.

Blackall, an Australian-born artist and illustrator, is most well known, at least in my house, for her illustrations of the chapter book series Ivy and Bean, but she has illustrated and won awards for several other children books. She's also a painter and a sculpter and an ex-household hints columnist. Among other things.

But I am most taken with Blackall's work on the Missed Connections project, a blog where she breathes life into those melancholy and hopeful ads that people place on Craigslist, reaching out to someone they crossed paths with but lost in the world. Her illustrations of these fleeting moments of connection are funny and quirky and beautiful and just so full of humanity, it puts a lump in my throat.

Prints of many of Blackall's Missed Connections illustrations are available in her Etsy shop.