Model maker Rachel Williams has proved a hit with a cult rap band.

Rachel was asked to make 50 North American Bigfeet - similar to Himalayan yetis - for The Beastie Boys.

She spent hours in her Worthing workshop adding fur to the resin figurines which were then distributed around the world to coincide with the launch of To The 5 Boroughs - the band's first album in six years.

The Bigfoot models, each almost a foot high, were given as gifts at launch parties.

Rachel, 41, of Pavilion Road, said: "It was quite bizarre but in the job I do there is an element of the eccentric about it."

After the resin models were cast by a Chichester firm, Rachel painstakingly attached golden-brown fur to each naked figure.

She said: "It was quite a time-consuming thing but we managed to get the furring process down to about half an hour per Bigfoot."

Each model was then, for reasons unknown by Rachel, dressed in a white apron.

Rachel, who works part time as a theatre crafts technician at Northbrook College, Littlehampton Road, Worthing, is no stranger to unusual commissions, which she undertakes on a freelance basis.

Last summer she was invited by Chichester Festival Theatre to make a model of a foetus for a show being staged there.

Rachel was asked to do the Bigfeet by Simon Woollard, of Grafton Road, Worthing, who runs a media production firm called Collective Media.

Simon, 26, had been approached by a client with connections to The Beastie Boys' record company.

He said Bigfoot, a giant hairy ape man also known a Sasquatch which is said to roam the North American wilderness, featured on the band's recent video Triple Trouble.

The Beastie Boys began as a punk band in the early Eighties, progressing to rap.