Linocutting for FHE

For FHE we put sick little Phoebe on the couch to watch a show and shut sick little Benjamin in his bedroom far away from everyone else (we even have a sign on the bathroom door saying "ONLY BENJAMIN" to remind everyone else to not use that bathroom so that we don't inadvertently share germs with him) and the rest of us did some rubber stamp carving/linocuts. 

The kids made all kinds of fun things—piano keys, a flower pot, a Lego hand, Miriam's music logo, some holly and berries—on rubber. I made a linocut of a person swimming butterfly. 

I broke it into two separate parts so that I could use multiple colours of ink. The top image in the picture below is one of the carvings—of a swim cap and a splash of water—and then the person's body is a separate carving. You can see that I didn't quite take out enough of the "noise" the first time I tried printing (because my goal is to leave room above the swimmer to write "Thank you!" or "Go team!" or whatever), so I took out some of that and tried again:

My blue was drying out by the time I finished flattening the image out a bit, so the water part didn't turn out so well, but I think it will work when I make official prints (because i won't stop to carve so much in the middle). 

I thought it turned out pretty well for my first attempt at layering my linocuts.

Unfortunately, we put both Andrew and Rachel to bed with fevers...here's hoping we can all pull out of this funk we're in by the end of the week...