Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke. Michael McKay Photography Randalstown.

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Charity hopes: The 24 women who posed naked want to raise £50,000 for NI Chest Heart and Stroke

Retailers have branded as too hot to handle a “Tastefully Nude” calendar by a local slimming group in aid of charity.

Hopes of raising tens of thousands of pounds for charity by posing naked for the calendar girl shoot have been dashed after the local ladies were turned away from local shopping centres and craft fairs.

“It’s a nightmare. We are all gutted,” said Sonya McAllister, founder of the We Slim Together group that posed for the nude shots.

All 24 women from the group — who together have lost 66 stone — dared to bare their slimmer new figures in the hope of

raising £50,000 for Northern Ireland Chest Heart and Stroke through the sale of their calendar.

But plans to spend their weekends and free time flogging the calendars in local shopping centres and craft fairs have now gone awry after they were refused admission.

Sonya, from Randalstown, added: “After all the hard work we put into it we can’t believe that people are refusing us the chance to sell it.

“We’ve approached a few shopping centres who turned us away and lots of craft fairs, some saying they had no room and others saying because of Christian values they couldn’t include us.

“Most people are not actually coming straight out and saying why we can’t sell our calendar but we know it has something to do with the fact that it is a naked calendar.

“It was so tastefully done and such a brave thing for the girls to do, for most of them it meant going right out of their comfort zone.

“There is more nakedness on the TV and in magazines and pop videos. I just don’t understand peoples’ problems with it.” The girls have 5,000 calendars to sell and at £10 a calendar they had hoped to present Chest Heart and Stroke with £50,000.

Added Sonya: “We have less than £500 raised and by now we hoped to have around £1,000. We are left with just those shops that have supported us and the website.

Calendars are available at www.weslimtogether.co.uk/buy-the-we-slim-together-charity-calendar/ or from Willie Allen Butchers in Ballymena, Serendipity in Newtownabbey, Fred Funk Footwear in Ballymena, Ohsolean mobile butchers and Kearney’s Costcutters in Randalstown.

Belfast Telegraph