I enjoyed looking at the different textures and backgrounds, especially ones that were available for free. In the interest of time, I limited myself to ones that could work with my site’s theme.
Urban Dirty I generally stay away from websites with white font on black background, but here, it works – the font size is large enough to read, and the black background goes with the whole urban theme.
Best Textures Flickr Group On Flickr, the background is white, text is black except for the logo in hot pink and blue, and blue hyperlinks. This draws focus to the important part of the site – the photos.
Torley Textures All I can say is colorful. Very colorful.
Deviant Art Textures The colors for this website are white, grey, and blue-grey (mono anochromatic?)
Texture King has a white background, with boxes bordered in orange.
Grunge Textures uses the curled yellowed page of a book as background. You can choose backgrounds of concrete, wood, stone, tombstone, brick, asphalt, etc. I ended up using a stone background from here for my website. I tweaked it a little to make it fit.
Grunge Style The examples are listed (images and everything) along the left side of the page. I like the comments under each image and how you can link to the sites. Other links on the Smashing Magazine site are in narrow columns to the right. It makes it easy to focus on the main information on the left.