Photoshop :: Coloring A Fabric - Color & Texture

I have a piece of fabric that I'm trying to colour with a variety of different light & dark colours (blues, yellows, reds, black, white, grey, etc). The fabric colour that I'm trying to fill is a light grey which shows the texture (shadows, pattern, etc) of the fabric. In the layers pallet I have the fabric layer set to multiply and placed above the colour layer so that the colour comes through.

My problem is that I'm having some difficulty in colouring in the fabric. With lighter colours it's not a problem, but darker colours appear to saturate the selection too much which results in a loss of texture definition - the cracks in the texture appear that they are filled with paint. At the moment I have been playing with a combination of fabric layers set at different blend modes & opacities: multiply, screen & overlay which works to a certain extent but I'm not happy with the realism of the results especially for the darker colours.

With that said I have 2 questions:

1. Does anyone have any good experience with colouring selections which maintain colour & texture accuracy (to see what I mean, design a shoe at NikeID.com). You can see how they colour a lace in a variety of light & dark colours accurately (accurate colours while maintaining good texture). More generally, what's the 'best' approach here to blend (or some other method) the full spectrum of light to dark colours?

2. Ideally, what colour should the underlying fabric be? (white, grey, black?) And why? I notice that it's easy to colour a predominately white fabric with light colours but increasingly difficult to colour the selection the darker the target fill is.