Thanks everyone.  I posted my results the other day in my gallery, but didnt get much response.  I guess this kind of stuff is mundane to most users, but it's a big deal to me to finally figure out the material tree in Cycles, and create my own materials, like velvet, from scratch!

I used it on a stock model i found in freestuff, which I thought would be perfect for the shader.  I modeled the other ornaments, but the bells and bow object aren't my model.  They are all my shaders.  I tried posting a small version to the freestuff forum, but was horrified at how the forums automatically reduced my image quality to crap, so I wont post images to the forums again.  It totally screws up the quality.

Please check out the results in my gallery here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2583726

I'd be thrilled to hear what you guys think.  All Cycles for rendering, and I don't know how to do any postwork beyond some color adjustments, so basically all a straight render.