It has been a goal of mine to create a charity calendar and to get as many people involved, I wanted to spread some positivity and raise some money. I had a lot of people messaging me to see if I was going to create a recipe book (somewhere they could refer back to my recipes that wasn’t necessarily digital), while this is a goal for the next couple of years for myself I thought I could produce a calendar with recipes for the time being. I also wanted to do something for women, to boost confidence and self love. Breast Cancer is a disease that affects 1 in 7 women, it was important to me so I chose Breast Cancer Now as the charity. They work tirelessly to try and make the world a place that anyone who is diagnosed with Breast Cancer lives.
It was a coincidence that my friend Emily Arundale messaged me asking me to model for her Photography Course. I messaged her back saying I have a better offer that will give you so much versatility in your project. In some manner I wanted women to be involved, Emily and I sat down and decided that we should have women of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities and ages in the calendar and having food tastefully covering their breasts. I wanted to create something that young girls could see and feel like they could recognise themselves in one of these beautiful models.
I put a post out on my instagram saying we were looking for models… I received well over 400 messages of women saying they would love to be involved and that Breast Cancer had effected their mother, sister, aunt or family. Emily and I chose 33 Models 3 every month and then decided I would end the calendar in December. We wanted the models to be down to earth, limited makeup, natural hair and in denim jeans.
Emily and I then had many meetings, discussing the location, I had the job of working on 24 recipes as I wanted to have a savoury and sweet food each month. We headed to a printing company for a meeting to see if they would be able to do what we wanted them to and we wanted to make sure the quality of the calendar was strong because it would be so upsetting if we put all this work in for a poor result. We realised we had given ourselves a short period of time to do this but we both knew we are hard workers and determined and we wanted to get this done so people could buy their calendar before Christmas.
Within two weeks we had finalised all the details and found our models so we could start shooting. All the models were amazing and travelled to the shoot site and were enthusiastic to help us! We created a schedule to make sure there was never more than 6 people on set due to COVID and it was so successful! The first week we did 4 days with 5 am starts and 7pm finishes. We were exhausted but it was so worth it, I would be in the kitchen cooking the food while Emily would shoot the previous dish. When the models arrived we would hand them the food and props and help them pose I would hold the reflector while Emily shot the photos. We needed to do this fairly quickly (bless the models) because it was November and freezing ! We found that a glass of wine around 2pm helped us through our long days!
The second week we managed to get the rest of the models and myself done, which meant we needed to edit the photos, recipe sort the layout. We had lots of meetings because we were both so pedantic about it. We did lots of sending off to the printer and drafts but by the end of November we managed to settle on what we wanted. We put the link to buy the calendar on the website and managed to get a bigger response than we ever thought!