There’s a sprinkling of magical fairy dust in the fashioning of miniature ballet and opera dresses by costume designer Vinilla Burnham.

Every sequin, bead, ribbon and fold of fabric is perfectly to scale on her gorgeous quarter-sized creations, which you can admire in exhibition cases at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden or buy to keep as a memento of a special performance.

Now, she is about to step delicately into the wedding dress market. Vinilla and her business partner, wedding dress specialist Debbie Phipps, are to expand into replica wedding dress miniatures, the ultimate memento of a bride’s special day.

“It will give me a chance to put some of the new technology around to good use,” says Vinilla from her studio in Danehill. “You can get some amazing effects with laser cutting, creating delicate and intricate patterns you just can’t do by hand in miniature.”

It’s a technique she will put to good effect in her wedding dress replicas. For these, she will source alternatives to the fabrics used in real-life wedding dresses. “You simply can’t use the same fabric as the actual wedding dress,” Vinilla explains. “It’s too thick and lumpy, and it wouldn’t hang in the right way.”

With plans to make a miniature replica of the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress to showcase the new venture, the Wedding Collection is set to be an exciting chapter in the charmed life of this costume designer, who has used her magic touch to conjure up out-of-this-world creations.

Vinilla specialises in unusual costumes and is behind some of the most iconic images on film, television and stage, such as Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman, Aslan the lion from the BBC’s The Chronicles Of Narnia, and Badger, Mole And Rat for the BBC’s 2007 production of Wind In The Willows.

She worked with Jim Henson on the fantasy films Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal and The NeverEnding Story III, with Tim Burton on Batman and Batman Returns, and with Jean Paul Gaultier on the 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element.

One of the most eye-catching costumes of Lady Gaga’s 2010 Monster Ball World Tour was a Vinilla Burnham mechanically-engineered “living dress” with wings, giant headdress and a 15ft train laden with fans, a dreamy example of the designer’s unique fusion of the dramatic with the girly.

It was the fantastic garbs she created for gnomes that led her to the idea of making miniature ballet and opera costume for the Royal Opera House, where she began her career designing for dancers such as Rudolph Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Svetlana Beriosova under theatre designer Nicholas Georgeadis.

“The miniatures are so nostalgic – because they are small, they evoke that feeling you had as a child when you believed in fairies and magic,” says Vinilla.

“When I was designing the costumes for The NeverEnding Story III, I was not confident with my drawings, so I got hold some of the figures artists use and made up the costumes for goblins in miniature. I have always worked better in 3D and I really enjoyed doing it too. It was a good stepping stone towards making the real things.”

Vinilla was born in Chelwood Gate as Vivian, later renamed Vinilla by her friend Justin de Villeneuve, and she and her sister Lal, now a costume designer for the Danish Royal Ballet, and brother Tim had a happy childhood in a family of performers.

Their grandfather, an opera singer, appeared in silent movies in the 1920s, and their parents, Edward and Lucille Burnham, were theatre actors who appeared on the West End stage. Student actors babysat the children, among them Alan Bates and Prunella Scales.

“As a little girl, I believed in fairies,” she laughs. “My sister and I would leave sixpences under the pear tree at the bottom of the garden for them and we made frocks and tiny fairy furniture out of cardboard.”

At the age of six, Vinilla was taken to see Swan Lake at Covent Garden. “The curtain went up on a whole other world and it was one I wanted to inhabit,” she says. “I was given these ballet books for Christmas with images of ballet dancers that had such atmosphere, mystery and glamour.

I wanted to be one of them.”

Vinilla won a place at art school but dropped out to work in the prop department at the Royal Opera House, where she learned how to make animal masks, wings, headdresses, leaves, birds... the list is endless.

Vinilla was inspired to push boundaries and has continued to do so throughout her remarkable career. She recently attended the launch in London of a limited collection of Zarb Champagne called Deep Black, whose bottles feature haunting underwater images of a model in a Vinilla Burnham creation.

Elegantly draped in Vinilla’s workshop at the moment is an original 1952 black ballet dress worn by her friend, the celebrated English ballerina Dame Beryl Grey, in a performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House. Vinilla is working on a miniature of the dress as a present for Dame Beryl’s 85th birthday.

“I like to do my own take on the costumes for my miniatures,” says Vinilla. “When I’m making one for a person, it is all about the actor, the movement, the script, the story. There are people who like dressed dolls, but to me they are all about the face and the hands and the hair, the personality of the doll. That doesn’t excite me.

“When I make the miniature costumes on these plain stands, all the focus is on the costume, and I love doing it.”