Your First Attempt at Heat Treating

I would recommend you make your first attempt at heat treating with something like a small detail plane iron, or a small marking knife. 

Steel - O1, starrett, Precision (Presto, Presco? it'll have a catchy name), or Bohler. These are steels that are generally found fine spheroid or annealed which means they can just be heated and quenched and you will get a good result. I would not start with 1084 or another more plain near-eutectoid steel because those steels need a faster quench, and they usually have no protection against grain growth. You're likely to get either underhard or bloated grain. 

Heat - a single torch - TS4000 is an excellent choice. If you use these torches into something that houses heat, you will burn out the igniters. Propane or Mapp would both work for this. 

Housing heat - A steel soup can sitting on bricks or something non-flammable. You will find getting a steel to heat much easier if there is something holding in some of the heat around the item. Directing the torch flame into a soup can, even uninsulated, will be a lot easier than just out in the open. you can heat treat something up to about an inch square if it's not too thick - out in the open. 

A magnet - you should have a magnet pointer or something similar - like the pick up tools, so you can see if the magnet will stick. A metal extension type tool will allow you to do this. You dont' want to leave the magnet in the heat, but you can insert it for a second or two and pull it back out. 

A decent vegetable oil, and in a can is better than a jar (the upper layer of hot oil after a quench can break a mason jar). On old steel paint can is fine. Nothing that will melt if hot metal or hot oil touches it, though. if your shop is cold, preheat the oil by heating something metal and dropping it into the oil, or just keep the oil in the house until before using it. 

Process:
* set up the torch propped on something so that it will be pointed into the can while running
* get the item you want to heat and gradually, but not slowly heat the item until it begins to become red. heat center out but in doing so, try to keep the color even on the entire item. Center out will prevent corners from getting overheated. 
* as the item gets to a red in color, test it with a magnet. Keep doing that until the magnet doesn't stick
* as soon as the magnet doesn't stick, put it down and start counting seconds. Heat the item you'll quench for another 10 seconds or so and try to get it to a full shade lighter. if it looked bright red, get to perhaps a mid to bright orange. 10-15 seconds of this heat overshot is plenty - don't leave the item in the heat for minutes. 
* instantly plunge the heated item right at the end of the count (don't dawdle) into your cooking oil quench and tussle it up and down but not at all side to side in any direction. Do this for several seconds and then you can just let the item go and let it sit in the oil for a minute
* pull it out then and lay it on a surface. It should be warm enough that it might still be hot to the touch, but it should by no means smoke oil

Once it's cool, wipe the oil off of it completely and place it in a toaster oven or a kitchen oven that is known to be accurate for half an hour at 400F. 

it should be a light straw color. If the edges are dark brown or blue, then the oven or toaster oven cycles bursts of high temperature heat and the edges have been overheated a bit. May still be fine

if this is done ideally, you will have something about as good as anything commercially made in woodworking tools, that will sharpen on any stone, and that won't have an edge that rolls easily

If you see flux coming to the surface of the item you're heating, which looks like bubbling, it's hotter than you want it, but if you see that flux in the 10 second heat overshot, quench immediately. 

the very first iron I ever heat treated was done this way after watching a larry williams planemaking video, though I can't say the process here is the same as larry advocated. Larry showed flux bubbles on the steel, I don't think I got to that level of heat. The result is an iron for a bullnose plane (small ideal size here) that still works well and is 61.5 hardness. A very good result that I still would never bother to replace even today. it's too good to consider replacing it.