3 days ago | Advertorial | Kerryn Whitlock

“My eyes are going. These are the last ones I’ll ever engrave.” Why a 76-year-old engraver from Toowoomba is offering her own little invention to all of Australia for the first – and last – time

For 18 springs, Lorelle Tunstall’s hand-engraved pocket flower presses were sold at one stall, at the Carnival of Flowers. She invented them for her granddaughter, who kept coming home in tears with crushed flowers. Now her eyes are failing, and her last 63 presses are going online for the first and only time.

Lorelle Tunstall (76) at her bench in Toowoomba this November, with one of the last presses she will ever make.

Toowoomba, November. The jacarandas are dropping purple onto the footpath, and the shed behind the Tunstall house smells of metal polish, beeswax and tea gone cold. On the bench under the window lies a row of small gold-plated plates, none bigger than a matchbox. Lorelle Tunstall pulls the magnifier lamp down, picks up her graver and leans in, the way she has done almost every morning since 1968.

“I’m 76,” she says, and puts the graver down again. “The lines on a petal are thinner than a hair. A year ago I could still see them. Now I find half of them by feel, and that isn’t good enough.” In June, the optometrist put a name to what she already felt: macular degeneration. “Slow, but it only goes one way,” she says. The house sold in October, and the shed goes with it. At the end of January, she and her husband Doug are moving into a unit in Brisbane, close to their daughter. “There’s no room for an engraving bench in a unit,” she says. “So this is it.”

It started with a little girl who came home crying

Lorelle has engraved for 58 years. She started at 18 in her father’s shop on Ruthven Street – trophies, honour boards, the inside of wedding rings – and took it over when he retired. The flower presses came much later, because of one little girl.

In 2008, her granddaughter Sienna was five, and every Sunday the two of them walked the long way round through the park to Lorelle’s place. Sienna picked everything: violets out of the lawn, dandelion clocks, a sprig of jacaranda off the footpath. She carried it all home in her fist or stuffed it into her cardigan pocket.

“And every Sunday it was the same,” Lorelle says. “We’d get to the gate, she’d open her hand, and it was mush. Squashed, wilted, petals everywhere. And then the tears.”

How most picked flowers end up: squashed in a warm little hand on the way home, or brown in a book three weeks later.

Why the old ways don’t work

Lorelle tried what everybody tries. She laid Sienna’s flowers in the phone book and stacked the dictionary on top. “By the time you get a flower to the book, it’s already half gone,” she says. “And then the book does the rest of the damage.”

A phone book is printed paper. It doesn’t draw the water out of a petal, so the flower sits damp between the pages for weeks. Purple turns brown, yellow turns the colour of weak tea, thicker flowers go mouldy, and the pages stay stained for good.

Other people try the quick way, with the microwave or the iron. “That cooks it,” Lorelle says. “Sure, it’s flat. But the colour’s gone and it crumbles when you touch it.” And the big wooden presses in the craft shops? “Lovely things. They live in the cupboard. Nobody takes a press the size of a chopping board on a walk.”

Fresh in the morning, pressed on the spot, still purple a few days later. That was the whole idea.

As an engraver, Lorelle knew exactly where the problem was. “When I engrave a plate, it has to be clamped flat at all four corners, or the graver skips,” she says. “A flower is no different. It needs even pressure everywhere, straight away, with paper that pulls the water out. Not three weeks later on a bookshelf.”

Two gold-plated plates, four screws and a pair of pinking shears

So one evening in the winter of 2008, she went out to the shed. She cut two little plates from gold-plated engraving blanks, drilled a hole in each corner and put a screw through every one. Between the plates she stacked blotting paper, cut with her mother’s old pinking shears so the edges wouldn’t stick together. On the lid she engraved a dandelion clock, Sienna’s favourite, the flower she always made a wish on.

Every press starts as a plain gold-plated sheet. Lorelle saws, files and drills each little plate by hand before she engraves a single line.

The next Sunday, the press hung from the zip of Sienna’s backpack. Halfway through the park she picked a violet, and the two of them sat down on a bench and pressed it right there. A few days later, Sienna opened it at the kitchen table. “It was still purple,” Lorelle says. “Exactly the purple it was in the park. She looked at me like I’d done magic.”

Sienna is 23 now. She still has that violet. It is on the first page of a little album that has grown into four.

How it works, in four steps

The press is 5 centimetres tall and 3.5 centimetres wide, a little smaller than a matchbox. It hangs on a keyring, a handbag strap or a backpack zip, so it is with you when you find the flower. Using it takes about a minute:

1 Pick it. 2 Lay it between the papers. 3 Tighten the four corners. 4 A few days later, open it. That’s all.

“Most people press their first flower in the car park after they’ve bought one,” Lorelle says with a laugh. “Then they ring me three days later to tell me it worked.” What comes out goes into cards, bookmarks, lockets, frames and scrapbooks.

Some of the flowers mean a lot more than that. Lorelle keeps an old biscuit tin under the bench, full of letters. She takes one out, from a woman in Dalby:

A few days later, the viola comes out flat and dry. And still purple.

Four flowers from Lorelle’s own garden

Every press carries one of four designs, each engraved and painted in by Lorelle herself:

Dandelion – the very first design, made for Sienna. “Every grandchild brings you a dandelion first,” Lorelle says. Cherry Blossom – for the flowering cherry Doug planted in the front yard the year they were married. Sunflower – for the sunflower paddocks on the Darling Downs that turn the drive out to Dalby yellow every summer. Clover & Forget-Me-Not – for the back lawn, where Sienna spent whole afternoons hunting for four-leaf clovers.

Because every plate is engraved and painted by hand, no two presses come out exactly alike.

The four designs: Dandelion, Cherry Blossom, Sunflower and Clover & Forget-Me-Not.

18 springs, 3,041 presses – and not one sold online

Soon Sienna’s friends at school wanted one, then their mums, then the women from Lorelle’s church. In September 2008 she took twenty to the Carnival of Flowers. They were gone before lunch.

Every spring since, she has stood at the same stall at the Carnival with her presses, and every spring they have sold out. She keeps count in a school exercise book: 3,041 presses in 18 springs. “People asked me about a website every single year,” she says. “I always told them: come to Toowoomba in September.”

Most presses are bought by grandmothers. A lot of them end up on a grandchild’s backpack.

What customers say

Why these are the last ones

There is nobody to take over the bench. “Sienna is studying to be a vet nurse,” Lorelle says. “And you can’t learn engraving off a video. It takes years before your hand knows how hard to push.”

On the shelf above the bench sits the last box: 63 presses, engraved, painted and checked. Lorelle tests every one herself. She tightens all four corners and makes sure both plates sit flat.

There will be no Carnival stall this year, because her eyes can’t take a long day in the glare any more. So Sienna has put the last presses online, once. “I asked her: do you want them in a box in Brisbane, or out in people’s gardens?” Sienna says. Every press now goes out at half of what Lorelle asked at the Carnival. “I don’t need to make money on the last ones,” she says. “I want them out there, picking up flowers.”

Lorelle and Sienna packing the last presses at the kitchen table. The moving boxes are already stacked in the hallway.

Where can you get Lorelle’s presses?

Lorelle’s presses are only available through County Craft, an online shop for small, independent makers, where Sienna looks after her nan’s corner. Only there will you get the original presses from Lorelle’s shed. Cheap lookalikes have started turning up on Amazon. They are cast and printed in a factory, not engraved, and up close they have nothing to do with Lorelle’s work.

Every press comes with a stack of scalloped blotting papers, the little spanner and the keyring fittings, wrapped by hand by Sienna. Shipping is free across Australia, and every order is dispatched within 1–2 business days.

Only until 31 January – then the shed closes

“By the end of January I’d like every one of them gone to somebody who’ll use it,” Lorelle says, wrapping a press in tissue paper. “After that, it really is the end.” She looks out at the jacaranda by the shed door. “Eighteen springs. Not bad for a press I made to stop a little girl crying.”

With the special price, the remaining 63 aren’t expected to last until the shed closes. Anything left after 31 January will be dispatched while stocks last. After that, there will be no more.

Always on the keyring, always ready. And what comes out ends up in bookmarks, cards and frames.

Our verdict

Lorelle’s pocket flower press solves a problem everyone who has ever picked a flower knows: by the time you get it home, it’s gone. Small enough for a keyring, engraved by hand in a shed in Toowoomba, and simple enough for a five-year-old.

A little piece of real handwork with a lot of heart, and the last chance to own one. Thank you, Lorelle!

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