OK, well this is my method. I learned it from my mother, who was an awesome seamstress. She believed in pre-washing and drying all fabric to both shrink it and make sure it was color fast. She thought dryers were the world's best invention because they would shrink any fabric that could shrink.
Wash dark colors with dark colors and light colors with light colors; that's pretty basic. Put your small pieces in a mesh lingerie bag. I use large ones. Do not "stuff" the bag. Water needs to flow around the fabric freely. (My mom made "mesh" bags out of garden netting.) This significantly reduces fraying. For large pieces of fabric that will not fit in the bags, sew a tight (short) stitch along all raw edges. This will significantly reduce fraying, and will be cut off when you "square up" the fabric. Any color thread will do; I just use whatever is on my machine. Wash in warm water. Mom figured warm was the hottest she'd ever wash in, and if she used cold, eventually the item would probably end up in a warm water wash, so she needed to know how it would perform in warm water. She also added a cup or more of white vinegar "to set the colors". Obviously a little less with smaller loads. She swore by it, as did Grandma and Great Grandma, and they had learned it from their mothers. My mother and Grandmothers are women from the Depression years who did not believe in waste; I have to believe they used vinegar here for a good reason. I have no statistics on this, but I've always used vinegar and I've never had any color bleed or fade, so there you have it. Maybe someone could enlighten us as to why this works? Mom always used half the amount of detergent she would use for a load that size. She said you really don't need much, just enough to get basically clean fabric clean, and to get the colors running if they're going to run. She also believed in drying the fabric until it was dry, and said the dryer was the best thing for making sure the fabric shrank as much as it was ever going to shrink. If you took it out damp, it still had the potential to shrink some more. So that's what I do. I wish I had her "coke bottle sprinkler" (remember those?), but I don't, so I use the sprayer on the iron, and also some spray starch to add some body back into the fabric. I press more than iron in the sense that I try to be careful not to stretch the fabric as I ironing. So there's more "picking up and putting down" of the iron until it's virtually dry (from the spraying and starch) and then I'll run my iron over it to smooth it.
The only tedious part is the ironing, and that goes pretty well with some upbeat rock in the background!