Commercial Clothing Design Question

Greetings to all! May you have an awesome Valentines Day!

Anyways.. on to the real stuff at hand. I just began designing t-shirts
for a local surf board company using Adobe Illustrator CS2. Since I
have 4+ years of experience in Photoshop, I would use that program to
design. Since it's easier to organize colors and scale images in
Illustrator, I redirected my design workflow toward that program.
There's one problem that's been bothering me though. To add a grungy
and cracked feeling to a graphic, I would usually make a random grunge
brush in Photoshop and mask out that texture from the graphic. But
because I don't know how to do that in Illustrator, I convert a
texture in Photoshop from raster to vector and export the paths to
Illustrator. Using a texture in Illustrator that has tons and tons of
paths slows down the computer like crazy, especially when just resizing
or changing the color. Simpifying the paths helps, but that doesn't
increase the speed too much even with my 2.5 GB of ram.
It would be helpful to know how professionals work with t-shirt
graphics and what workflow they would use in this situation and in
general. Maybe making the graphic in Illustrator and then masking out
the desired texture in Photoshop is the way to go, but I don't know
if that would cause problems in the printing process...

Thanks for the help!
-Sergie