Studioape - Thanks! Let's see, can i even remember what I did?

I assume you are talking about the skirt texture, not the background, right?
I painted the skirt all on a seperate layer, just a solid chunk of skirt. I treated it as though it were a white skirt. Then I cut the texture from the photo and did a little rotating, cut-and-paste, and use of the clone tool to make it fit my line drawing. That was all on a seperate layer above the skirt layer. I constrained the visibility of the top (texture) layer to the area of the lower (filled-skirt) layer by alt-clicking (in PC) or Cmmd-clicking (on Mac) between the two layers. I use this trick a lot, it's very worth knowing! The top layer was set to multiply so that only the dark checks showed up. I'm sure I did some painting and layering of lighting over that, but there are the essentials.
hope this is of some use!
-mike