Last year

it was handmade greetings cards. Now her room is filled with glassware, paints, beads, pictures and ribbon. She nests in amongst it all, sitting on a beanbag with her laptop on her lap. It is all very cosy in my daughter Rosa's space.

These are a few examples of her work:



Notice the colour matching and the beads all thread in a style to match. The pictures are found on the Internet, printed, carefully cut and pasted.



The nineteen-twenties have been an interest - and note how there is a poem on the background here:



Whilst here is a just a line from a poem ...



This one has a Japanese theme:



and as in the last little display with the miniature bamboo plant, the finished pieces are put together in R's bedroom with other artifacts that have a similar theme:



The glassware is displayed around her room in little groups, each with appropriate other artifacts - e.g in a magical/fantasy genre/ Japanese or nineteen twenties. A commonly used icon across all themes though is the wings which are given to many of the characters. They are all carefully selected from a huge collection she has gathered from across the Internet; colour and size must match the character. They are all angels or fairies.

I think it is interesting the way we create backdrops for ourselves; we often fill our spaces with artifacts that seem to set the scene in particular ways, as if our world is a stage set that has to present a consistent and particular message. This is, I think what Goffman was getting at in his work 'Presentation of self in everyday life.'

Maybe when people get irritated with a mess in their spaces, they are nervous that the backdrop is creating the wrong presentation; yet there are those who like to live in mess. This is might come from a desire to resist one particular 'reading' of the self - ! /em>Or maybe even a desire to mislead!!

Of course blogs offer possibilities for presenting identities to others, exploiting the public/private affordances of online spaces ...
Stern (1999) has compared girls’ homepages to their bedroom walls where self-expression and public presentation come together as textual constructions of self. Yet these are complex textual constructions which reflect tensions across multiple selves, showing what

in some way the selves girls think they are, the selves they wish to become, and most likely, the selves they wish others to see

(Stern, 1999:24)

I know that in writing my blog I present a particular self and have a particular range of themes. As I write I tend to think I am showing a 'real me' whatever that means; I think I mean that I am not aware of the type of identity I am presenting; it seems to be the same as the me elsewhere, but I do not really believe this can be so. The medium always changes the message. The blog just poses as a window onto my world but it is a filter.

I love to write my blog and feel disappointed when I cannot get to it everyday. I think it is not that I am egocentric (although I may be) but that I have created a space for myself and I can make it whatever space I want. People share it with me and I like that; I can bring to, bits of my life, turn things round and present them and re-present them in different ways to help me think.