What helped me during me first laner jobs, was just playing safe. Observe some laners, try out their builds, and then, when you play, first focus on your minions. If that means tower hugging against a very aggresive enemy laner, so be it. Once you are confident at last-hitting, you can poke your enemy laner a bit. The best time to do this is when one of his minions is nearly dead - so he has to decide: kill minion and take damage, or dodge damage and lose gold. But don't do this until...

If you want to be versatile, I'd buy Skye. You say you have some experience with her, and most of your experience is in the jungle. When you buy Skye, you can use her as a jungler, but also have a laner available with whom you can actually do something instead of just randomly getting ganked. Win win situation to me. Although I personally prefer Krul. Slow starter, but extremely strong late game. I've won several 1vs3 battles with him, and I only managed to repeat that trick with catherine...

I suppose a good way to start when your friend list is empty, is by either entering a guild and play with the skilled players there, or enter some casual matches and add decent teammates to your buddy list through there. Carrying a game on your own is not enough when playing against a well organised team. Solo queuing ranked games is a near-impossible job it seems...