Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford Ellen Ashford · October 15, 2026
Three ink problems look alike but have different causes. Learn how to spot feathering, bleeding, and ghosting—and which paper actually fixes each one.
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Best Watches Under 100 Dollars I Would Actually Wear Daily There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes from a cheap watch. Not that it breaks — most of them do not — but that you stop reaching for it after three weeks. It sits in the drawer, technically functional, quietly unloved. I have … Read more
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Best Blue Fountain Pen Inks: 10 Bottles I Have Used and Ranked Blue is the most crowded shelf in fountain pen ink, and most of the differences that matter are invisible in a swatch. A colour that looks gorgeous painted on Rhodia can feather into a smudge on a photocopier’s paper, take ninety seconds to … Read more
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Best Everyday Pens for People Who Lose Pens: My Rotation I write about fountain pens that cost more than some watches. I also lose pens — in coat pockets, in the car, in other people’s houses, at a hardware store counter in 2023 where I definitely left a pen I still think about. For a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · September 1, 2026
Premium Rollerballs That Write Better Than Most Fountain Pens This is an awkward thing to write on a site with this much fountain pen content, so let me be direct: for a lot of everyday writing, a good rollerball is the better tool. Not the more interesting one. The better one. A rollerball starts instantly … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 25, 2026
It comes up on every pen forum eventually: someone has a scratchy nib, someone else suggests a dab of Brasso, and the thread splits into people who have done it happily and people who are horrified. Since the advice keeps circulating, it is worth answering properly rather than just recoiling. The short answer No — … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 25, 2026
A refinished dial — a redial — is a dial that has been stripped and reprinted at some point in its life, usually during a service decades ago when it was considered a straightforward tidy-up rather than an act of vandalism. It was normal practice. It also, today, removes most of the value from a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 25, 2026
I have written before about the five-minute inspection I run at any watch table — the crystal, the crown, the shake, the sniff test. That post is about how to check a watch. This one is about what to be looking for in the first place, because a triage routine is not much use until … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 10, 2026
I have rewritten the same letter three times. Not because the words were wrong — the words were fine — but because a smudge ate the third paragraph, my lines drifted into a slope that made me look careless, and the envelope sealed itself shut before I had even folded the paper. Three attempts, three … Read more
Ellen Ashford · August 9, 2026
I’ve done my estate sale watch inspection routine so many times that it runs on autopilot now — five minutes, same sequence, every table, every time. It didn’t start that way. It started with a $200 mistake on a Saturday morning in a stranger’s garage, a watch that looked perfect and turned out to be … Read more