Linda Reeve used to be ‘that’ woman on the train – the one knitting away amid the grind of the daily commute from Frankston to the city.
Those days are gone. Today, the entrepreneurial mum, 45, is the brains behind a blossoming online business called The Flying Lamb. Her office (she calls it the woolly workroom) is an upstairs studio at home in Frankston South and from there she crafts chunky blankets, throws and knitwear so divine one could almost eat them.
Linda uses the highest quality wool in the world – Australian merino wool – and one look at her website or Instagram is enough to induce drooling: babies, children and beds draped in luxurious, oversized hand-knitted blankets.
“Knitting is part of my DNA,” she explains. “The giant stitches of my chunky knits are an extension of standard knitting techniques that have developed over time. Hours of testing, tugging and tears all fuel my passion for these big, beautiful chunks.”
As with any speciality product, there are unique challenges to this craft. Linda buys Australian wool roving (unspun chunky wool) in ‘bumps’ or ‘bales’ and uses cumbersome, oversized knitting needles up to 1.3m long. “It’s not knitting the way our nannas used to do it,” she says, laughing. “I have to use 1.3m-long needles for the king-size blankets and that’s only because I can’t get the needles any longer!”
Her most popular design is ‘The Melbourne’ – a charcoal king-size blanket – and her clients include women buying for friends, mothers and daughters spoiling each other, men shopping for their ladies and everything in between. “I’m really lucky to work in something so beautiful,” she says.
They are literally pieces of art, hand-made right here under our noses.
THE FLYING LAMB
W: www.theflyinglamb.com
Instagram: the.flying.lamb
FB /TheFlyingLambau