Homemade Low-budget Bookscanner

What It Is: a low-budget digicam-based bookscanner of my own design (it's that wood-and-black paper-and-acrylic contraption sitting on the cardboard M that you're looking at).

Where It Came From: Built it myself, with components from Hobby Lobby and Lowe's.

What It Means:
I have a huge preservationist streak.  It doesn't help the hoarding tendencies at all, and in the past, it has led me to collect Public Domain-aged books (1922 or earlier in the US, at least until Congress's next retroactive extension) and scan them for Project Gutenberg.  When I did this, I was just mashing the books on my scanner bed as best I could while trying not to damage them.  Once, I ran into something (vintage Count of Monte Cristo fanfic, of which a good deal was actually published back in the day) where the pages were too fragile to survive the process, and I actually cut the pages out to scan them --- with no little personal drama, being as I am one of those "dies a little inside every time a book is destroyed" types.

And so, later on when I started following the folks at QuestionCopyright.org (in the spirit of fan-artist self-advocacy; only later did I happen upon the Organization for Transformative Works, and I recommend giving both of them a look), I was fascinated when they announced The BookLiberator, a device to scan books more quickly, portably, and non-destructively, using two digital cameras to capture pages much faster than a flatbed scanner and with not only adequate but surprisingly good results.

I didn't keep close tabs on it, though, and just in the last few months went back to find that the BookLiberator project had been abandoned, and the Ion BookSaver that they pointed to as an alternative didn't seem to get off the ground either, but they also linked to people who haven't given up the fight, at DIYbookscanner.org.  Their standard design is a thing of brilliance, but was beyond my budget, equipment, space, and requirements.  Their simplest rig, consisting only of a cardboard box and a pane of glass, was closer to what I needed; I was willing to make some sacrifices on efficiency, but I had an inspiration of my own.  I did make the cardboard box book cradle, but my bright idea was to build a camera mount onto an acrylic box-style picture frame, which as you can see above is what I did (to an 8.5" x 11" frame using my hand drill and backsaw with miter box), and I even made it its own thread on the DIY Book Scanner forums.

However, it has its share of problems.  The black paper box you see attached to it was an addition after the fact to minimize the otherwise-disastrous reflections in the acrylic, and became even more unwieldy when I scaled the design up for an 11" x 14" frame, plus the picture frames were not made to resist scratching and will have to be replaced eventually.  I also didn't get enough distance between the camera and the book, so that the images it produces require a good bit of post-processing to eliminate lens distortion and skewing.  In the end, what I came up with actually isn't more efficient than a flatbed scanner, but it is gentler, and the molded acrylic angle at the side of the frame is better for digging into books that are printed very tight into the spine (especially comics with bleeds) although there does come a point at which nothing can save it, unless I go the dramatic route and cut the book up...

Ironically, given where this journey began, it isn't public domain books I've been scanning with it.  I just haven't been taking the time to deal with those myself anymore, and instead have begun shipping them off to The Internet Archive's Open Library for the most part.  Actually, I've been using it to digitize obscure Japanese video game comics... which I might show you some other time...

Where It's Going: Nowhere; keeping both it and its even-more-unweildy 11" x 14" brother despite them being bulky and getting in the way, because I do use them now and then.

Delta Shopmaster Benchtop Drill Press

What It Is: a Delta Shopmaster benchtop drill press with built-in lamp.

Where It Came From: I don't remember; Lowe's, maybe, unless Harbor Freight had it as a special.

What It Means:
In High School, I avoided Shop like the plague despite the urgings of my art teacher mentor, in part because my sister had taken Shop and had a bad experience.  As a result, my first access to a wood shop came in my Fine Arts college education, when I took Intro to 3-D Design (it was a graduation requirement; 3-D is not generally my thing).  Even in that little taste, it was wonderful what I could do there --- and the machine I really fell in love with was the drill press.  Don't ask me why it was just so beautiful to turn that lever and make straight, regular holes...

Some years later, when I lived with a friend (I'm not ready to get into all the details of my post-college situation), she bought a house that actually came with a workshop in the back, we lived perilously close to a WoodCraft and a Harbor Freight Tools, and it was a point in my life where, in hindsight, I'm embarrassed how much money I spent on various schemes.  We stocked the workshop somewhat, and I did some tinkering.  I never did get the benchtop bandsaw of my dreams, but there was a belt/radial sander and a scrollsaw (which was later upgraded and moved to the garage) --- and of course, a drill press.  The most impressive thing I remember making was a yarn skeiner; not a huge, fancy project, but I designed it myself, and it had a cog that clicked a counter and everything...

However, when that situation went bad and I moved to where I am now and the drill press and sander came with me, they had nowhere to go but storage.  I still don't have anywhere to put them, and if I move from here it will probably be into an apartment where they would become even more ridiculous.  Faced with a need to declutter (and realizing that I could actually get some money for them), I decided it was time to let them go. Finding a place to take a woodworking class and get access to a communal shop would probably be much more reasonable at this stage in my life --- and when I have projects now, you'd be surprised how far you can get with a hand-drill, a backsaw, and a miter box.

It had been long enough that I had forgotten how heavy the drill press was; wrestling it in the car wasn't something I ever wanted to do again, giving me an extra push.

My Dad actually had some regrets about my unloading of the tools, saying he'd like to have a place to mess with such things, but that place doesn't exist and may never exist (and would probably just expand the clutter problem by another building if it did).  And then I had to talk Mom down from buckling under my secondhand account of Dad's wistfulness...

Don't get me wrong, wood shop tools are wonderful things --- especially drill presses --- but I have no regrets.  Free space and money are better than things you don't know when or if you'll ever use.

(Except maybe that little ceramic kiln...  ::not ready yet on that one::)

Where It's Going: Already went, actually.  Sold locally for $40.

Precious Moments Cross Stitch Patterns

What It Is: Four "Precious Moments" Counted Cross Stitch Patterns, featuring designs from the Precious Moments Chapel

Where It Came From: a Ben Franklin store that hasn't been there for years

What It Means:
These are something I've moved on from in multiple dimensions, and what isn't "has been" about them is "never was."

Firstly, Precious Moments.  I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I loved Precious Moments once upon a time.  I had a Precious Moments Bible.  I lived within a few hours of the Precious Moments chapel, and can only breathe a sigh of relief that I never went there.  Now as I write this, I find I still have some respect for them; they are effectively evocative in their intended sentimental --- perhaps glurge-y --- way, and as someone who majored in Fine Arts when she was actually trying to be a cartoonist, I give props to Mr. Butcher for respecting his own cartoonish style and making the most of it.  However, my aesthetic tastes have matured, and Christian sentimentality has been cast into a very different light.

The Precious Moments phase came at a time in my life, around junior-high or high-school age, I'd say, when I was maturing enough to try to take an active role in my own spirituality but was still caught inside the country-church Christianity I was raised with, and ended up doing things like reminding myself that the Second Coming might happen before I woke up the next morning and beating myself up for liking my sister's video games better than church, "No other gods before Me" and all that.  It was crazymaking, and once you've bought into it (notably the bits about damnation and eschatology) it's not an easy thing to extract yourself from.

I eventually managed it, though.  Today is a Sunday, and I just got back from the long drive to the church I go to now --- a Unitarian Universalist church.  We had a wonderful message this morning about the cycles of beginnerhood, learning, and mastery that take place within all the phases of the overall cycle of our lives.

But these items are not only Precious Moments, they're also Counted Cross Stitch patterns.  Long ago, before there were free craft patterns and craft pattern stores all over the internet, we who did crafts (at least in my rural area) would look over the Leisure Arts leaflets at Wal-Mart as the world of possibility, and I watched them for every new Precious Moments cross stitch collection.  Then, on occasion, we would get to the Ben Franklin store, and that world of possibility would be elevated onto a higher plane, such as with these larger, artsier patterns.  They were, however, always an aspirational thing; I never had the staying power for a large Counted Cross Stitch design.  I had some books of "Precious Moments in Miniature" and made several of the designs from them, but things like this would have been beyond me, even when I bought them.

And then, at some point not so long afterward, I swore off Counted Cross Stitch entirely.  I've done a variety of crafts since I was a girl, and although I haven't done them much lately, knitting or crocheting or dollmaking aren't things I would relegate entirely to my past --- Counted Cross Stitch is, as I realized that, for me, it was a ridiculous amount of work to go to when all I would get out of it is an oddly bumpy and pixellated picture to hang on the wall, and that I had much better methods of making pictures to hang on the wall.  Don't get me wrong, it can be wonderful (there are designers who put all those Leisure Arts leaflets to absolute shame, not to mention rays of sunshine like this) and some people enjoy it --- including my sister --- but it isn't for me, and hasn't been for a long time.

So that trove of Counted Cross Stitch patterns Mom and I found in a filing cabinet?  Well, she can keep any she wants, but the Precious Moments ones go.

Where It's Going: eBay