Simply Maya User Community - Blend Shape Dilemma!!

Well for starters, hey to all! This is my first post on this forum, so SSUP!

Alright, let's get straight to Business. Here's my problem.

I created a series of blend shapes for the sake of facial expressions for one of my characters. This is my first time modelling and animating using blend shapes.

So far, all of the straight-forward blend shapes worked fine...tested and approved.

Now, my next step was to use blend shapes to animate the eyelid opening and closing. Seeing is how the eyelid doesn't close linearly, I had to create an inbetween, so the eyelid would follow the round contour of the eyeball.

Yesterday, I found a tutorial explaining a method (perhaps the only method) on in-betweening blend shapes for just such a cause. I created two duplicates of my original model, one modelled with the eye at half-closed, the other at fully closed, and when I selected "deform - create blend shape, I made sure to check off "inbetween".

Now, that worked to a certain degree. The eye does open and close properly. The problem is that this blend shape conflicts with all my other blend shapes. I noticed that in the blend shape animation editor (with the sliders), the blend shape that I created for the eyelids (the only one with an inbetween), the slider is separate from all the other blend shapes...
The problem arises that if I have the eyelids closed, none of my other blend shapes work...they just don't respond. As well, if I have one of the other blend shapes at 1 (eg...mouth smiling...eyebrow squinting etc...), and I move the in-betweened eyelid closing slider, it overrides any other blend shape. While the eyelid closes, the mouth returns to its original position.

So what am I doing wrong, or what am I not considering when creating my inbetweened eyelid close blend shape?

Adam