FOR most of us, Christmas comes next week, but for window designer Nina Tillett, it's all over bar the shouting and she is quite happy to forget all about it for another year.

"I start talking Christmas in May," she says.

Small wonder, then, that, on December 25, she won't even have a Christmas tree in the flat she rents above her workshop at Botleys Farm in Downton.

Nina's company is whimsically named Minki Balinki, and she set it up at the beginning of this year, after trading under her own name since 1997.

She has spent the past seven months surrounded by resin, coloured Perspex, mirrored acrylic and injection-moulded PVC, which she formed into crystal chunks, snowflakes, shimmering sequins and glittery icicles, to turn the windows of major London stores, from Harrods to Kurt Geiger, into winter wonderlands.

"Harrods had the theme of ice hotels and basically wanted the ultimate Christmas decorations hanging inside," she says - but they wanted resin.

"I didn't know anything about resin, so it was a huge learning curve.

"That can be annoying about this business - you get something down to a fine art and then you never do it again."

She had the resin crafted into slicks of ice injected with glitter and they hang alongside suspended wine glasses apparently dripping icicles and giant snowflakes in a frozen futuristic landscape looking out on to Brompton Road.

Christmas is without doubt her busiest time of the year, although on Nina's calendar it is several months removed from the conventional festive season.

By November, most of her commissions are in place, installed over a series of all-nighters when the tills are silent - columns of giant shimmering sequins for House of Fraser in Oxford Street, thousands of ice cubes drilled and hand-threaded on to different lengths of wire for Mulberry or crystal Christmas trees and bead curtains for Mappin and Webb, all mixed with lighting to transform windows into glacial palaces.

"My job," says Nina, "is to wake people up from their visual complacency.

"If you do that, you've done a good window."

Nina (27) developed a unique technique for colouring Perspex while completing her degree in multi-media design at Loughborough College of Art and Design.

Whilst there, she had her work included in the New Designers Show in London, winning an award for floor and wall coverings and the attention of Harvey Nichols, which commissioned her to design the atrium interior of its new Leeds store.

Her first London store - Dickins & Jones in Regent Street - was nerve-wracking.

"It was absolutely terrifying when you consider how many people walk past those windows every day," she recalls.

Nina settled in south Wiltshire in 1997, when she came to work for Georgina von Etzdorf, initially on winter and summer print collections but later designing the window of von Etzdorf's London store.

"It's quite a small area and that allowed me to be experimental," Nina says, recalling the "warmth and twinkly loveliness" created by thousands of sequins threaded on to runner bean-style garden netting.

"I'm employed for technique, and how it's applied depends on the client and how free a rein they give me," she explains.

She uses freelance workers on a project basis, depending on their specialist skills, but says: "I'm very hands-on and wouldn't ask anyone to do anything I don't."

Not all her commissions are major London fashion houses.

She has produced net pom-poms in different colours and knitted industrial waste into dress shapes for boutique chain Matches and, this Christmas, Salisbury's own designer store Hollyhock, on New Street, boasts filmy PVC spirals that catch and hold the light beautifully, courtesy of Minki Balinki.

"It's different places, different people and different work all the time, so it never gets boring and is always challenging," says Nina.