Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford Ellen Ashford · July 16, 2026
Turn a sheet of ecru stock up to the window and you can see it — that faint grid of fibers catching the light, the slight give when you press a nib against it. That’s what I’m doing right now, testing a stack of paper samples one at a time instead of writing the post … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 15, 2026
Here’s the myth I want to dismantle straight away: pen pal culture is not some relic kept alive by retirees and typewriter enthusiasts trying on a personality. I bought into that assumption too, once. Then six years back, I mailed a handwritten letter to a woman in Kyoto after she’d left a comment on one … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 14, 2026
Four-tenths of a millimeter — that’s the entire gap between the lead size that wrecked my handwriting for three straight months and the one that fixed it overnight. Five years back, I picked up a mechanical pencil sized 0.9mm, assuming it was the ordinary kind, and spent a whole season producing lines that looked like … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 13, 2026
What actually happens the very first time you try this? In my case: a scalded thumb, a cracked impression, and the wrong wax stick entirely — a genuinely clumsy start that was, somehow, still thrilling. If wax seals for beginners is the search that brought you here, I’d like to spare you the singed fingertips … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 13, 2026
Early on, I tried to blot a fresh puddle of Diamine Oxblood off my desk with the sleeve of the sweater I happened to be wearing, and I learned two things in the same ten seconds: fountain pen ink does not care about your clothing choices, and hesitation is the whole problem. Since that morning … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 12, 2026
Collector forums love to argue about whether physical media is dying or making a comeback, and on the subject of letter writing the advice splits into two camps: one says it’s a dead art not worth reviving, the other insists any handwritten scrap counts as a real letter regardless of paper or ink. The second … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 11, 2026
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is when calls like this start coming in: a neighbor presses his late grandfather’s Omega Seamaster into my hands, convinced it just needs a fresh battery. It takes a minute to explain — as gently as I can manage — that a mechanical watch has never run on … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 11, 2026
Nowhere on a pen brand’s spec sheet will you find a warning about ink pooling in your cap after a warm afternoon, or a note explaining that a converter’s plunger sometimes stalls out well short of full capacity. Fountain pen converter vs cartridge gets treated like a footnote decision — pick one, fill it, move … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 10, 2026
A single letter stamped into steel — just “F,” nothing else — is all the identification my old Pilot Metropolitan nib ever gave me, and for a while I figured that letter also stood for “flawed.” Fresh out of the box, that pen caught on every upstroke like a fingernail dragged across window screen. I … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 9, 2026
Nearly every new collector assumes that if a watch’s most visible parts check out — a correct-looking dial, a case that seems right — everything underneath follows along honestly. That assumption is exactly how I came within a signature of handing over $1,400 for a Rolex Datejust built from spare parts pretending to be a … Read more