Just wanted to share my experiences with this material. First off I like to deal with George, straight forward honest service.

I order his new 14 oz polyester fabric for the latest boat. He warns this is a loose weave fabric and he wasn't kidding. Coming from two boats using a tight weave nylon this was a new experience. I learned very quickly that my old methods would yield a mess.

I sewed up the pockets on the ends and stretched it over the boat no problem. Just be sure to use small stitches! (Next time I will use a running stitch)
Now to the deck. I learned, no pulling the fabric tightly around the boat with your seam! You ended up with major pull holes in fabric. So, I removed 3 feet of stitching off the back deck and started over. Good thing about the loose weave is you can easily shove it around and fix the pull holes once you stitches are removed.

I started resewing the deck and I discovered that a running stitch worked better for me. Small stitches rather than larger ones I had been using. I was sewing with a braided Dacron/polyester thread from George which I like working with. I will however be adding hemostats to my sewing kit because this thread will loosen very easy. Clamping it off with hemostats when I stop would be a great advantage.

Since I could not pull the skin tight with the thread I simply pinched the skin together between my fingers and making sure it was snug on the frame. I used a running stitch and put the seam right at the deck level. The boat skin was very loose and made me a bit nervous to look at it frankly. But it shrank very well and pulled all the wrinkles out no problem.

The downsides are it is not an easy fabric to work with! You can get pulls holes extremely easy. Bumping into the stands moving the boat can create a pull hole. With Some experience sewing I was able to sew with with a just a few errors and they are easy enough to fix. Remove a few stitches, rub you fingers across the skin to move the fibers around and resew.

Another down side is it shrinks enough to mess up you boat. I had a "baidarka-ish" stern on this boat and apparently when I shrank the fabric I did more so on one side than the other. Now I have a crooked tail and I am going to have to reskin this boat to fix it or paddle in circles. I used a plywood coming that is screwed together instead of sewn on and the screws grabbed the fabric and created two pulls. No easy way to fix that either.

Bottom line, I don't think most people would like this fabric after working with a tightly woven fabric. The loose weave requires a new set of skills and a different way of doing things. Will I use it again? Probably so. Now that I know what I did wrong, I am sure I could do a much better job with it. But, if I can find a tightly woven polyester I would chose that over a loose one and give up some of the heat shrinking abilities.