Watches, Pens, and the Craft of Analog Living
Ellen Ashford Ellen Ashford · July 3, 2026
Estate sale season always starts the same way for me — the first warm Saturday after a long grey stretch, when families finally get around to clearing out a parent’s dresser drawer and half the tables in someone’s garage are suddenly covered in old jewelry boxes and wristwatches nobody wound in years. That’s how a … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 3, 2026
Spec sheets will hand you beats-per-hour figures, accuracy tolerances down to the decimal, and battery-life estimates measured in years — but none of that paperwork tells you what it’s actually like to live with the thing strapped to your wrist. I got a real education in that gap at a cramped repair bench in Kyoto, … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 2, 2026
Caliber 1012 — that’s the movement stamped inside my 1970 Omega Seamaster, a bi-directional automatic I’d just brought home and wasn’t wearing often enough to keep alive on its own. Seven years back, staring at that number in a repair manual, I decided the fix was obvious: buy a winder, keep the rotor spinning, problem … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 2, 2026
Seiko 5 Review: The Watch I’ve Bought Seven Times and Keep Coming Back To I own seven Seiko 5 watches. Not as a collector’s flex—I genuinely wear most of them. The SNK805 sits on my desk right now, case brushed to a soft matte from years of field work. The SRPD55 with its ocean-blue dial … Read more
Ellen Ashford · July 1, 2026
Open the second drawer of my writing desk and you’ll find an old cufflink box doing double duty as a watch tray — eleven pieces inside, not one of them over $200, and right up front sits a $45 Seiko 5 I almost passed on because I figured anything that cheap had to be trouble. … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 30, 2026
Don’t get leather wet. That’s the blunt version of a lesson that cost me an entire strap and a fair amount of pride. I had a gorgeous cognac leather band strapped to a dive watch, wore it kayaking on the Chesapeake, and by the time I dragged the boat back onto the sand the leather … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 30, 2026
Right now, on the felt tray beside my loupe, sits the watch that started this whole expensive habit: a $45 Seiko 5 from an estate sale, its case back rattling and its crystal so scratched it had gone milky. I figured a wipe-down and a fresh strap would sort it out. I had no real … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 29, 2026
$340 changed hands across a department store counter, and in return I got a shiny full-retail watch and approximately zero useful knowledge. I pointed at something in the case, paid for it, and left feeling like I’d joined a club I hadn’t actually earned entry into. No mentor, no roadmap, a budget I hadn’t really … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 28, 2026
Nearly every beginner walks into a vintage watch purchase assuming that a clean-looking dial and a confident seller are proof enough of originality — and that assumption is exactly wrong. It’s why I once stood frozen in front of a tray of watches at a Portland flea market, listening to a seller swear up and … Read more
Ellen Ashford · June 27, 2026
Here is the myth I need to bust straight away: shimmer ink is not simply “sheen with sparkle added,” and treating it that way is exactly how you end up scrubbing metallic grit out of a converter on a Saturday you’d rather have spent writing. That deep, shifting purple I once uncapped for the first … Read more