Actually I felt the approach to creating the shader would be more beneficial, since you’d know what to do instead of what I did because of it. But seeing it will probably help in understanding. I hate reading boring text myself, pictures will do better for sure.
So, here’s the basic shader roll-out. Some of you might not recognise some of the terms used here, the ones that do probably dno’t need this explanation.
The Color slot which has the gradient is basically <diffuse color>, which in calculations gets multiplied with Kd, the <diffuse amount>. This is more efficient than just using a color slot for diffuse, you should try and use both, so that you can adjust eventual output levels in a more balanced way without going into other applications for it.
Kd or diffuse amount has a fall off map assigned to it to control the brightness of the surface at differnt angles, this i swhat I’m talking about basically, and color of-course. I’ll explain more later after the over all.
Sheen maps. there are some assigned here, but I’ve switched them off for rendering. Basically this is what you see on edges of hairy objects, where the hairs reflect light more and differently than the objects surface, basically you culd fake this yourself using a combination of several maps, sourcing data along with the surface normal(direction).
Bump map was applied to slightly break up the surface, computer graphics simply are to consistent to be easy on the eye, break it up subtly without destroying leverage for effect and the effect itself of-course, 
specualr level has a noise texture added to it to make it seem more broken up and irregular, for the same reason as with the bump map. (That’ll teach you to pay attention, lol :p)
[[img]http://img282.echo.cx/img282/2107/shaderrsettingsall9ht.png[/img]](http://www.imageshack.us)
Ok, so this basically is all needed for that cloth I made, except for the SSS effect, and ofcourse you need the rendering engine to go with it, GI and bounce ligth help an image so much further into a nice complexity.
On with the shader settings.:D
You’ll notice I’ve blended the map to about 50-60% of the base colour which is red. I do this for the general balance in the shader itself, so that it seems to deviate from red and not be some collection of nifty colourschemes.
he only things I changed about the map is the colour gradient itself and the type of gradient to normal, I haven’t assigned any mapping to the object itself, some renderers will ask or tell you about missing uv’s in this case. I ignore it since it uses different data. It would only serve for texture baking. You’ll notice the colours are very dark, but upon making the gradient put in some slight variations in those darkareas, it adds complexity and interest along the different angles.
That’s that then, onto the next map.
[[img]http://img277.echo.cx/img277/3460/shadersettingscsramp6ta.png[/img]](http://www.imageshack.us)
So the noise is obviously to brake up the rendering, so I’ll skip that. It just adds complexity to the surface.
The last bit, the diffusion amount, is controlled by a fall off map in this case. All the settings are there. You’ll see it’s low values, but that’s because I wanted a dark cloth so I lessen the effect like this. If the hairs point at you you’ll see more cloth which should have a different raction to light in general, so that’s why I use this. That’s all. I had wanted to do more shaders at once so it would be easy to understand but this is enough I hope. Maybe otherss will follow later.
