Normal Heights is my favorite San Diego neighborhood name, though the area doesn't contain any mini resources. San Diegans spend a lot of time outdoors, so I was only able to find one mini shop, Ms. Peggie's Place (5063 Cass St., up in the Pacific Beach area). Visiting the kind of shops where you pack a sack lunch and plan to spend the day has left me jaded, but Ms. Peggie's is a perfectly solid regional dollhouse store that carries the basics, enough quirky stuff to be interesting, a few half-scale room sets, and some exciting artisanal pieces in quarter-scale. I bought two quarter-scale rustic twig sets. They must have been irresistable, as "rustic" is totally out of character for me.

Update from February 2006: On a trip to Ocean Beach in search of a cheap Mexican breakfast, we found The Dollhouse Factory of San Diego, which sits at the back of the Ocean Beach Antique Mall on Newport Avenue. On our visit, they had lots of handpainted furniture, not to mention gorgeous handmade sofas and chairs. There were also a few assembled houses for sale.

Quilting is apparently the only indoor hobby in this town. According to the Cruisin' Quilters brochure, there are 19 quilt shops in the greater San Diego region. I gave up on trying to get to all of them. Two of those I visited stand out as particularly ripe in miniature-friendly patterns. Rosie's Calico Cupboard in El Cajon had a slew of small-scale patterns in pre-cut fat quarters. At Fat Quarters, look for the preselected bundles to give you color coordinating fabrics for an entire house. (You do know that, if you saturate a piece of cotton fabric with spray starch and iron it dry, it will act almost like paper and can substitute for wallpaper, right?)

My real find, though, was Beached Glass and Beads (594 Carlsbad Village in Carlsbad). It's a bead store and scrapbook store in one. The owner is still building the scrapbook section, so the paper supply is interesting rather than huge ("interesting" = "I bought a lot"). The bead section is truly superlative, including not only beads that work as vases, lamps, tables, and art -- but also bins of exciting mixed beads at a fixed price per ounce. Aside from building my "filler beads for lids and such" supply painlessly, I scored a glass apple that's the perfect size for a cookie jar and a skull to be an end table base for my tiki Arthur. While you're in Carlsbad, Sowing Sisters quilts is right around the corner, though the selection tends to run to bolder fabrics.

It's also worth a trip through the tourist trap of Old Town San Diego, where El Centro Artisano had the half-scale people that I like so much, including a grandmother and a mid-sized child.