Some great information here, guys!  Thanks!  I'm putting together something using a combination of the two examples in this thread.  I was really impressed by a velvet shader I saw from a render done in POSER of all applications!  It was a great looking velvet material, and I'd been trying to get that same effect in Blender without success.  Seeing these examples at least shows that it can be done in Cycles!  phew.  Would have scared me if there was a shader in Poser we couldn't do in Blender! hehe!