Hi Lisa, thanks for the links.  I've already made extensive use of the Neal Hirsig ones at www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html, unfortunately he doesn't have any material on creating characters or clothing or cloth, which is what I'm trying to do.

On Renderosity and Daz I see some pretty evolved 3d clothing, but there's like a conspiracy of silence among 3d clothing creators.  There isn't even one comprehensive clothing creation tutorial on the internet.  The people who know how to do it obviously don't want to share their knowledge. 

And the Blender Wiki pages (the Blender instruction manual) about cloth and softbodies are really terribly written  - they are so jumbled up and missing important information that even if you follow the instructions exactly, you can't accomplish what they are supposedly teaching.  -   And it's not because I have no aptitute for following computer instructions - I've mastered some pretty demanding software like Final Cut and Photoshop.

I guess it matters a lot that Blender is a free, open-source program - there's no corporation like Adobe or Microsoft behind it - who make absolutely certain that nobody has any trouble learning how to use their products. 

I was in a computer bookstore today and there must have been more than 50 different books about learning Photoshop, and 10 to 20 books about learning Maya.  There was only one  book about Blender, and it had nothing about character creation, and very very little about making 3d clothing.

I've searched youtube etc. for video tutorials about creating clothing, and they are dismal - almost all of them amount to nothing more than  animating one piece of cloth to fall onto a sphere.