A woman from Cumnock has dressed her dogs in a staggering 79 unique costumes for a charity calendar.

Julie Bunten, who runs High Maintenance Beauty in Cumnock, has been keeping herself busy in lockdown by staging fashion shoots with her pooches, Stella, Harvey and Oscar over the course of the past 10 weeks.

Stella, a one-year-old English Bulldog, is the star of the show, wearing much more of the costumes than her reluctant friends. Harvey, who also appears in the pictures, is an eight-year-old boxer and is keen for posing roughly half the time.

But Oscar, a three-year-old Boxer, wants absolutely nothing to do with the dressing up.

They’ve even dressed up as key workers in a tribute to NHS and care staff, fire service workers and the police.

Julie, 46, said of Stella: “She absolutely loves it, she gets so much attention. She runs through and jumps up to get dressed most of the time, but if they don’t want to I just let them be.”

What started out as a boredom breaker and a bit of fun for Julie and the dogs soon turned into an idea for raising much-need cash for charity.

Julie, who is unable to work at the moment due to coronavirus restrictions, had a bit of free time on her hands so begun dressing up her dogs as a way to pass the time.

She said: “It started off just for fun, I had a dog costume at home and dressed her up in it one day and put the picture up on Facebook.

“People loved it and wanted to see more, saying how it cheered them up and that they were loving it, so I just kept doing it.

“Then I was dressing Stella up one day and decided to make the pictures into a calendar to raise money for Islay Dog Rescue in Cumnock.

“They rely on donations from the public and I wanted to do something for them whilst they are struggling for donations during the lockdown.”

Julie has 14 more outfits in the pipeline and hopes to then get to 100 before calling it a day. The photos of each outfit will then be collaged and put into a calendar for the public to purchase. All profits will go to charity with Julie only retrieving the costs for printing the calendars.

Her dogs have had some history of dressing up, with them even winning various competitions in the past.

Stella won an online competition with Lanarkshire Bullies, a dog food supplier and also models for Woofgang Apparel, a dog collar business based in Irvine.

Julie said: “It might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the dogs do love it. Even if Stella doesn’t look happy in some of the pics that’s just her bulldog face.”

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