I found an interesting article here Covering a Replica with Grade A Cotton and Irish Linen (kitplanes.com) about the covering process. I was able to find a place selling Irish linen, albeit at $56 per yard. I've heard (read) that Grade A cotton is still being produced somewhere, and did find a place that carries "airplane cotton", but certainly more research and testing would be needed to determine if it's actually suitable for aircraft use.
Measure twice, cut once...
scratch head, shrug, shim to fit.
Flying an RV-12. I am building a Fisher Celebrity, slowly.
I'm fortunate in that I experimented with small test panels. A minimum investment. This guy in the article spent a lot of time and money discovering the same thing about the fabric on his full size project.
The natural fabrics used in covering early aeroplanes was unbleached and uncalendered. The bleaching of fabric weakens the fibers. Calendering is a process where raw fabric is run through a series of rollers under high temperature and pressure to "set" the fabric to prevent it from shrinking. We use whatever material was original to our projects, most commonly silk or linen.
After covering your surfaces with uncalendered fabric, lightly spritz the fabric with water and as it dries the fabric will shrink. After it's completely dry, you can brush on several light coatings of nitrate or butyrate dope. When first applied, each coat of dope will cause the fabric to slightly sag, but it will become taunt as it dries. Four to five coats are generally required, afterwhich a color coat can be applied. Seaplanes generally require as many as seven base coats before color application. In more modern times (mid 1920's on) it gradually became more common to lightly sand the fabric after each coat before applying the color.
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