Its starting to look gorgeous Stormie. I can throw some stuff at you about the tooth thing though.
You might have a hatching style so I don't know how this is gonna work, but I gotta throw out what I know.
On the shading, I use light feathery circular motions. I go over that again with the appropriate pencil grade. If I'm doing really light skin tones, I like to bevel a 5H to get a flat smooth side, and lightly tone the paper with that. Sometimes I barely touch the paper. On miniature drawing, I've layered the tone this way and worked my way through value gradations, so that I didn't have to blend. One false move on something that is no larger then two inches, and you had smudged out the persons face! You can really get some cool affects like this if you say, "Im only going to use four values" And stick to them. I generally do this until the tooth is full.
I also sometimes use on portraits the Bristol vellum smooth paper, because it doesn't have a whole lot of tooth to begin with. Kind of depends on what is being tackled here. And since paper will drastically change the look, I like to mix it up a bit.
If your blending a face, an adult face that is, your not going to want it super duper smooth, unless your looking for that polished porcelain look. Use a light hand with the pencil, you can always add value in by slowly getting it there, and tweaking, and blend in the direction of the form. You can get allot of value gradations for free like this too, and then darken the darks as you go along. Now, the darker pencil grade will always blend better then the light. That is why I go really gradual when I'm dealing with those pesky H pencils, or not so heavy handed with the lighter scale of the B's either.
Real toothy paper is going to be a real butt hole, but if you want a nearly black area, you could use charcoal, dust it off, and then use a dark B grade over that in pencil. You can put pencil over charcoal but not the other way around. It looks like velvet. Oh, when I do this I use natural willow or vine charcoal sticks since the compressed is blacker then I want it.
eh, I got a little wordy on this one so I hope it makes sense.
But, the last advice, if the blending keeps pissing you off try experimenting with different paper types.