I collect the flower and allow it to dry and drop its load so to speak on a dry plate or similar. This can then be scraped up and put into a container or like you have applied with a q tip. Those pre flowers look developed enough and not discolored so should accept your pollen.
If dried, collected and stored right pollen is viable for 12 months or greater. STS is a far better method as is using a cut to reverse and apply to another cut from the same mother. Selfing it's basically seed clones, however the potential is that of the parent/a. So if all strains involved are ok, all will be ok but nothing amazing.
The best way in my opinion is the first 3 generations bred regular with samples of say 50 plants or greater at least at f2. F2 is what makes or breaks a strain. You can just ditch all 50 or 100 if none pop out at you, and believe me, outliers will smash you in the face in many, many ways. Might take 120 seed plants.
Once you have 3 gens of homogenous selection of outliers and a semi stable strain you select the best female, clone her, femme her. Femme fire.
Crossing two strains as S1 or f1 is only a cross of the two parent strains and is in no way a strain. Others might say different.
However to provide yourself with some femme seeds is well done. Congrats mate a lot of people balk at this and really it's not hard. Really look into STS it's far superior to any other method. Also using clones mate, far better then seed plants. Seed plants are mums.
I'm hopeful though.
