Pictures of beautifully painted stairs have been featured on decorating blogs recently. These inspirations made me itch to continue the saga of my own small stairway. (Polymer mosaic tiles were a 1998 project and the wall installation was added in 2007.)

Mareike Scharmer’s fantastical interiors on Flickr (don’t miss the bathroom) and then Wendy Malinow’s ethereal dining room wall in Portland (here’s a snapshot of it), emboldened me to have another go at my humble hallway.

First, friend and muralist Bonie Bolen painted the risers and trim. Then we collaborated on embellishing the risers with paint, small round mirrors and baked polymer cane slices.

The only problem with the resulting sparkling “celestial stairs” is that they lead you to believe that there’s something special upstairs…something more than a bedroom and office. The project to polymerize my decor continues.

It’s been a year since we visited Virginia’s Angie Wiggins who happily mixes paper and bead work with polymer. These paper bowls are embellished with beads and polymer legs. Angie learned to embroider at a young age and it shows in the delightful details sewn onto many of her pieces.

On her Facebook page you can roam through her tidy, cozy studio and see some of her most recent mixed media efforts. Don’t miss her metal clay and polymer jewelry in her gallery page.

I’m putting these wine stoppers here to remind myself how cool and useful they would be in my kitchen. Here’s what we posted about Angie earlier on PCDaily.

One of my guilty pleasures at retreats is taking pictures of artists’ workspaces when they’ve left them for the night.

The tools and the piles of projects in process give a glimpse into how an artist works. Piles of scrap and dissarray are as intriguing as the tidiest table.

My favorite items are the personalized tools. Maybe it says something about how the artist values his or her skill, taking time to decorate a humble tool.

Kim Korringa’s work surface was littered with petal canes last night. Because she often wraps canes with Jones Tone foils, they pile up without sticking to each other.

The canes were surrounded by experiments and evidence that she was having a good time, like a littered kitchen after a particularly good party.

San Diego’s Meisha Barbee showed me her new polymer clay circle pendants in colors that are a bit brighter than her earlier palettes.

She sent along these Serenity pendants as well. She’s tweaked the colors while continuing her distinctive combinations of extrusions, canes and textures.

Meisha promised to rank “launch my website” high on her list of resolutions for 2010. In the meanwhile, you’ll have to settle for this link back to her earlier work. She sent along a couple of pix of her new sunny in-home studio as a bonus. It’s back to Ohio for us today.

Portland’s Meredith Dittmar reveals some of her process through her Flickr site photos. This fascinating insider’s view shows the scale and complexity of her vision and lets us glimpse her methods of working in 3D in polymer clay.

The piece pictured here is entitled Inter-thinking. It’s a 14″x12″ polymer clay sculpture now at Jonathan Levine, a NYC gallery that exhibits work influenced by illustration, comic books, graffiti, street art and pop culture imagery.

Some of Dittmar’s new pieces are for her December solo show at Upper Playground in Mexico City. Don’t miss her wide-ranging projects, a t-shirt design, clay illustrations for a lingerie company, an animation for a bank, and of course, her guys.

Susan Lomuto at DailyArtMuse sent the link along.