self.spider = spider
dispatcher.connect(self._item_passed, signals.item_passed)

def _item_passed(self, item):
    self.items.append(item)

def run(self):
    self.crawler.crawl(self.spider)
self.crawler.start()
self.crawler.stop()
self.result_queue.put(self.items)
building scrapy spiders into my own program, i don't want to call scrapy from command line)