Some way to rotate an object with skew already on it?

I did google for about an hour but the headache's grown too strong to continue, so here's the question.

So I just started an animation, a leaf fall sequence. I have the leaf keyframe-by-keyframe (i.e. no tween automation) animated to translate along a nice elegant float, and I wanted to add the rotation in afterwards. However, before starting I had to skew the shape a bit to get it how I wanted it to look at the start. Now every time I try to add some rotation to a frame it resets the skew before rotating. Is there any way to separate the two? Maybe keyframe individual attributes like I remember After Effects could?

Alternately, a second question: I figured out I can convert the bitmap to a symbol and that'll freeze the skew and then I can rotate the symbol, but between each keyframe it changes itself back to the original bitmap with the skew. I try selecting all the individual keyframes I need to convert and Convert to Symbol all at once, but it only converts the very last keyframe I selected, every previous one is untouched. Is there any way to convert the bitmap in every keyframe into a symbol?

I would very much appreciate any useful postings, i.e. answers or links. "Go read the forums" both is useless and has been tried a headache-inducing amount.