The blanket was woven using weft floats (which look like warp floats on the reverse of the fabric).  Weft floats are when your weft thread passes over top of more than one of the warp threads at one time.  As a general rule regarding floats, if you are creating something that is worn or handled a lot (like a towel or blanket) it is a good idea to keep your floats to something like an inch in size or smaller.  Larger floats can get caught on things and can quickly become an annoyance if a fabric is handled frequently.  I created a fabric with two stacked weft floats combined in an offset, all over pattern.  I really like the affect it had on the fabric, these little oval shapes were created from the draw-in that I found to be very pleasing.  The weft floats themselves were created using two pick-up sticks in the back of the loom to create faux shafts on the rigid heddle.  (I actually used one pick-up stick and loops on a stick to create a string heddle as my second set of pick-ups. This was just so I did not have to keep removing a stick when weaving.  It is a cool trick that I will do a tutorial on soon.) 

It is a little hard to see, but there are subtle, thick, vertical striped in the blanket created by alternating between the ivory and maize colors in the warp.  I used only the maize color for the weft.  You can see these colors in the fringe of the blanket.  It was purposeful that it would only be a subtle striping in the blanket itself, as the colors themselves were very close in hue.  The photographs below show the blanket before it was finished with washing and a close up of the final texture after finishing.  

This is a stroller blanket, measuring 25x40" (with the fringe).  It was woven in acrylic, so there was really no shrinkage after washing, though there was a 10% draw-in from the weaving.  I have two, well, maybe three comments about the yarn choice.  First, as mentioned above, I raided my mom's yarn stash and was grateful for whatever yarn she was willing to part with.  I feel I got lucky, these colors turned out great together and I am very pleased with the look and feel of the blanket.  That leads me to the second comment about the yarn.  I do not generally use acrylic yarn for my projects.  However, for baby blankets I know will get a lot of use and abuse, acrylic is a great choice.  It washes and dries well, it is easy to clean, and it is very strong. I do not like the feel of some acrylic yarns, they are sometimes stiff and almost plastic feeling, but these two yarns my mom had were very soft.  Very soft.  And it was great, after I washed and dried this blanket...they were even softer.  That leads me to my last comment about the yarn.  Acrylic yarns do not "bloom" when you finish them, but these yarns did feel even softer after I washed them.  The blanket also seemed to fill in a little, mostly because the yarn was allowed to relax and re-distribute itself after I took it off the loom and put it through the wash.  (And I literally threw it in the wash with a bunch of other clothes and dried it on medium heat in the dryer.  Like I said, I show acrylic yarns no mercy.)  

I love it when something looks a little more complicated than it actually is.  I had some leftover yarn from a Christmas gift I had knit and I really liked the yarn too much to leave it in my bin of discards.  (Who doesn't love Malabrigo, really?  Can't leave that laying around.) Even though I have been warned against weaving with single-ply for warp, I decided I'd risk it and try out a houndstooth cowl idea I had bouncing around my brain.  Rigid heddles are more forgiving of single-ply and handspun yarns than their shaft counterparts (though it's not impossible to use either on a shaft-loom...if it were, there would have been centuries of naked people in history).  Rigid heddle looms put yarn under less tension and often, because of the plastic heddle, are a little less abrasive to the fiber. 

I warped my 15" Cricket using the full width of the heddle.  I warped a 2x2 color scheme, meaning I had two teal feather warp threads then two natural warp threads all the way down the heddle.   Then, with the same two colors for the weft, I had a 2x2 scheme weaving, as well.  Two picks teal than two picks natural.  Because there was a color change ever two picks, it was not practical to cut the thread each time, so I carried the colors.  (Sometimes, if you have more than a few picks, a carry can look messy or cause a loop that can get caught on things.  I found that with the 2 picks, the float carried up the side for each color change was minimal.)  Tip:  Choose one color on your bobbin or shuttle stick to place "in front."  For me, my natural color was always the shuttle closest to my fell line.  When it was not in use, I rested it either in my lap or on my woven fabric.  When I was done with the teal shuttle stick I always placed it behind the natural shuttle stick before picking up and weaving with the natural color.  This created a consistent look with my floats along the side of my woven fabric because the carries always overlapped each other in the same way.

I am an advocate of hemstitching fabric.  Even if I plan on doing a folded hem or seam later, a hemstitch at the beginning and end of your fabric really helps hold things together when you take it off the loom.  For this cowl, I ended up sewing a zigzag stitch along the hemstitch and then completely removing any fringe before folding the ends under and sewing a hem with my sewing machine.  Then, with both ends neatly hemmed, I used a tapestry needle and some extra Malabrigo to seam the two hemmed ends together mattress stitch style.  

I am pleased with the results.  I think it was a great use of extra yarn and I had no problems with the single-ply warp.