Madapolam is a soft cotton fabric manufactured from fine yarns with a dense pick laid out in linen weave. Linen weave is the simplest and thickest interlaced, reversible basic weave, in which the appearance of the face and back of the woven fabric is the same. Its smallest repeat is 2/2, where two warp and two weft threads are interlaced alternately and is used in many types of fabric. Madapolam is used in embroidery, the production of handkerchiefs and as a base fabric in cloth printing. The weave pattern is useful because the equal warp and weft means the tensile strength and shrinkage is the same in any two directions at right angles and because the fabric absorbs liquids such as ink, paint and aircraft dope equally along its X and Y axes.
It was famously used as the covering for the de Havilland Mosquito a pioneer of monocoque aircraft airframe construction and in other aircraft, tautened and stiffened with aircraft dope.
"Madapollam" is the name of a village near Narsapur, West Godavari, Andhra Pradesh, India where the British had a cloth factory.
Read more about Madapolam: See Also