Sewing project progress: pink checked dress muslin, part IV, plus mysterious heartburn pain

Bad night yesterday. Went to the urgent care center to get my unhappy belly and chest pain checked out, and basically just got told to watch for signs of it worsening and was sent on my way. But I've been having heartburn-like pain in my solar plexus setting in in the evening for the last four days, pain that doesn't respond to the typical heartburn measures of Tums or Pepto or even ibuprofen. I wake up pretty much fine in the morning, but it's bad enough that it makes it hard to get to sleep. The doctor doesn't think there's anything really wrong with me that isn't just going to have to run its course, but because I felt okay when I was getting examined, like an idiot it didn't occur to me to ask what to do about the pain. So last night was spent tossing and turning because it hurt too much to relax enough to fall asleep.

Anyway. On a more positive note, I fitted my pink checked dress muslin and sewed up the side seams. Now, if I'd been doing this right from the start, I would have had a good way to transfer markings from the pattern onto my material, and then made minor adjustments to the basic pattern suggestions based on my own body measurements. I plan to do better in the future, as I have requested the tracing wheel and transfer paper that captainecchi* suggested for Christmas gifts. For now, I decided to kludge it. I held the dress up to myself and pinned it along my sides to make it conform to my shape. Then I unzipped it, took it off, rezipped it, and faintly connected the pins with a line of pen. I took the whole thing to the machine and sewed the sides, using those marks as my seamline.

Once sewn, I tried the thing back on. Damn if it didn't fit half bad! My kludgey method actually did make it conform pretty well to my shape, keeping all the darts and things in the right places. I made the skirt a little too narrow on the right side, making it impossible to pull it over my legs, but I just ripped it out to the hip, repinned it, and sewed it more carefully. Turned out fine. Imperfect, especially since the fabric is so thin it sometimes clings to the outline of my bellybutton (tacky, tacky, tacky) but overall not that bad. Much better than my first disaster of a dress attempt, which was so rushed and stupid that I can't believe myself.

I wasn't sure how to take a picture of this, since I don't want a shot of me wearing it until it's finished, but I couldn't think of any good way to display how it's sewn up. So I just draped it over a chair and took an oddly angled shot of it just for illustrative effect. You'll have to trust me that it makes sense until it's done.

Next step is to put in the facings and sew up the shoulders. That is seeming to be trickier than it first appeared.

Also, on another fabric-related note, what do we think of this?

On a whim I draped my sheer white striped curtain that I got at the thrift store over the empty curtain rod holders on my office window. It's just thrown up there, so I'd have to figure out how to arrange it more carefully, but do we like the idea? Does it work in that place? I do find myself wanting to put curtains up where the windows are bare...