The only thing I do different from the rest of the posters is that I have a small corning ware dish with a bit of water and one or two drops of dish or laundry soap in it. I take the corner of each fabric I'm going to wash, dip it in the water and give it a couple of squeezes to see if it's going to bleed. If it does, I pull it off to the side and work on it till it will be nice and play with others. It only takes one disaster to ruin months of work. When people tell me they never preshrink I cringe. Shrinking is also an important fact especially with flannels, they will shrink at different rates. Just as a side note, once I bought several flannels for my brothers xmas present quilt and one started out with a smaller width than the others. I didn't realize that it was about 38 on 42 until the end of the quilt when I scrambled and pieced the last 2 inch hst. Between the shrink and the smaller starting size there was no opps allowed on this quilt.