IT WAS not so much a love of fantasy that nudged Halinka Fraser into making her dream-like creations, but more earthly needs.

The mother-of-two needed extra money to pay for her “very talented” then-13-year-old daughter’s ballet training when she decided to start making a business out of the tiny model figures she once made for a school fair.

Now her fairies, mice, Mad-Hatters, Mr Foxes and other characters that tumble out of her imagination have been shipped around the world and even starred in the windows of Harrods.

“I love designing them and coming up with ideas,” said the 53-year-old, speaking from her workshop in the basement of her home in Montpelier Street, Brighton, where she makes the figures out of wire, beads and all manner of embellishment.

In a set-up that would put Santa’s elves to shame, walls are piled high with boxes of cloth, beads and sewing equipment, while the figurines sold in their hundreds, often as gifts or party pieces, hang on the walls.

Russian skaters dangle next to Mad Hatters, foxes next to rabbits, mice in their smart red jackets next to fairies decked out in gold and wedding cake couples gazing into the future.

“That is all I have left at the moment,” said Halinka, who used to travel the world designing leading theatre and opera sets, speaking to The Argus after a busy Christmas.

Her business, Halinka’s Fairies, now makes her a comfortable living – and paid for that ballet training, with her daughter training in Riga, Latvia – but there have been tense moments along the way, recalled Halinka.

“I had done a few pieces for the school fair when the kids were little and it was my sister who said if you want to make money you should sell these,” she said.

“I phoned up Country Living [the high society magazine] and said I would like to take a stall at their fair. I pretended to know what I was doing and he said, ‘that will be £2,000’.

“So I borrowed a grand from my mum and took out some of my daughter’s savings and arrived at this fair with a big bag of ivy and some ribbon and whatever stock that I had made.

“They had all these beautiful things at the fair – lots of duck blue furniture - and I was like, ’Oh’. But then I made all my money back on the first day so after that I was not worried.”

The following year her business featured on Country Life’s poster for the fair, and business was booming. Then came the limelight: A call from Harrods.

“They have elite customer rooms up there and they wanted to use my figures as part of the packaging,” Halinka recalled.

“I said, ‘Most people buy this as the present!’ I was not really beating about the bush. Then I ended up making 500 mice for their elite customers and doing the mice for their window display.

“And I got a license for that because they are really good on that front. They renewed the licence fee this year and I have got more mice in the window.”

The mice are one of dozens of figures designed and made by Halinka, including Christmas pudding, daffodil, Turkish delight, and candy cane fairies, and a Mad Hatters Tea Party collection, featuring the Sugar Plum Fairy, Alice, The White Rabbit, doormouse, Mad Hatter and March Hare.

Among her most popular sales is her collection of Russian skaters, featuring the smart, expressive moonlight and imperial skaters.

She makes them herself, with occasional outside help, delicately constructing the body using wire armature wrapped with yarn, then clothing the characters with handpicked fabrics such as silks, vintage, lace and evening dresses, and embellishing with hand-stitched beads, or delicate wings. Slippers are dabbed on with glitter and remarkably expressive faces created in a few simple strokes.

“I do them in batches,” she said. “I think how popular they are going to be and then make a batch of them – no bigger than 50, which might take a week.

“Sometimes I have to imagine I am a Chinese factory just to produce it all– like any job there are moments when you just need to get it done.”

Halinka designed theatre sets for world-leading productions having graduated with a first-class degree in theatre design from Wimbledon School of Art.

She worked on sets for the Sydney Opera House, La Scala opera house in Milan, and for a major production of George Bizet’s opera Carmen in Earls Court, London.

But she scaled down on that work when she had children, with the erratic schedules of a life in theatre difficult to manage with toddlers to look after.

“I think when we have got a job where you can employ someone [to help with the children] for three hours a day it works,” she said. “But then if you want somebody for six weeks and then not at all, it is harder.

“ I did a bit of teaching at Wimbledon Art College and a few lectures here and there, but did not really enjoy teaching that much.”

It was her grandmother who taught a very young Halinka to sew, a strict ritual Halinka now appreciates.

“I have always sewed and made things,” she said. “My grandmother taught me to sew when I was five, with proper fabric – if it was not right you would unpick it – at the age of five.”

Her business is now at a comfortable level and she has few expansion wishes, other than for her fairytale creations.

“I want to do a fairy for each month of the year,” she said, “and want to do something like the North Pole collection, which involves things like polar bears and things like that. I’d also quite like to do vegetable tea patch fairies.”