Sometimes I’m sure part of human fascination with silk is how its shimmer resembles that of water.
(Yes, that’s an anole on a walk at the bottom of the pic.)
In a way it shouldn’t surprise us; water is a fabric of life.
It creases.
It folds.
It whumphs in the air, and flattens out.
Laying almost still.
Until we go riling things up again. That’s humans for you. 😉
(In case you’re wondering – yes, part of all these pics is also story research. I have an Idea for a character who’s able to manipulate the fabric of the universe. And part of it is creating “fabric” of color and light – or possibly night, to the relief of one vampire….)
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
And there’s a reason one style of glass for stained glass work is called “water glass”:
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That second-to-last one does look like cloth of night, too.
Not much of it in Florida, but snow can be the — ahem– frozen version of the same silky ripple.
The blue is way less than the deep blue of water, but sometimes before sunrise it will just glow blue. Link is to a picture where the camera managed to catch the color of the snow, even if it was only when I was distant focused– now imagine that color, in the snow at your feet.
It really does feel like magic.
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Does the ‘fabric’ spring forth as a sheet, or is it’s creation as labor intensive as anyone who works with fabric would expect?
Actually, side note- the definition of fabric I found was “Cloth or other material produced by weaving or knitting fibers.”
Does chainmail count as cloth? Does leather count if it’s braided? What would be the closest equivalent, in terms of light?
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It would depend on secondary definitions (how is “weaving” or “knitting” being defined, there) to answer your questions. By some definitions, that would preclude stuff that’s crocheted from counting (that’s not _knitting_), and by most stuff like nalbinding wouldn’t count (the string may weave through the pattern, but it wasn’t _woven_), and chainmail would be even farther out… but by the more lenient definitions yes, they’d all count as cloth. After all, for weaving, some definitions require a loom (sometimes being specific even about the types of designs that count, not just anything with the name “loom”), thread (some definitions specifically limit the material, and the form the material takes, such as size and whether it was twisted vs braided vs pulled), or only count certain types of patterns (perpendicular threads, one direction forming the fixed part, and the other direction being woven through it, for example), while others define it much more leniently (especially when defining it by action rather than by resulting product).
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How much work it needs depends on how long it needs to last. If she just needs some shadows for a few minutes (to keep a possibly friendly vampire from crispifying), then she doesn’t need more than a little magic. If she wants something permanent she needs physical materials and time to put in as well.
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At once transparent and opaque.
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