Welcome to SRP. Personally I wouldn't apply paste to my only strop. I'm not saying that you need to have a bunch of them but I like to have a regular strop and an alternative paddle or flat bed strop to use for pastes. Using paste every time you strop may be too much of a good thing IMO. Others may differ but that is the way that I see it. Yes, you do use the linen before the leather. Here is an excerpt from a barber's manual on stropping in the help files in the SRP Wiki where you can find many other tutorials that will be of help.