runway bride (the engagement story)
BY CARLA JEAN WHITLEY PHOTOS BY JASON WALLIS
Check out Heidi Elenora's wedding dresses
There has always been romance wrappe d up in Heidi Elnora, communicated in each couture wedding gown designer and Project Runway alumna Heidi Elnora Standridge creates. Heidi’s own romance has also unfolded in her Cahaba Heights shop. In October 2005, months after fi lming Project Runway, Heidi was hit by a drunk driver. She was working at Carter’s in Atlanta, but her mother brought her home to Birmingham to recuperate. Heidi is always eager to get on to the next project and quickly grew bored with lying on the couch.
One night, Heidi joined her best friend Tanya at Tanya’s boyfriend’s house. That boyfriend was Jeff Baker’s roommate. During a Halloween party a week later, a friend bet Heidi $10 she couldn’t get Jeff’s phone number. Heidi got the number, and soon after, the guy. (She’s still waiting on the money.)
The couple dated long distance for six months after Heidi returned to Atlanta. She quickly tired of both the work and the distance and returned to Birmingham.
“I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have insurance. I didn’t have a place to live, and I didn’t have a 401(k),” Heidi recalls. “But I loved him. So I thought, we’ll be OK.” After moving home, Heidi decided she wanted to design wedding gowns. Jeff quickly set about fi nding a site for her shop. He found the Cahaba Heights house that is now home to Heidi Elnora.
On their two-year dating anniversary, Heidi and Jeff split for six months, a break that ultimately strengthened their relationship and Christian faith. When they reunited, it was on the condition that he propose within the year. “I’d already had enough time to think about it, consider it, pray about it,” Jeff says. “That’s what I wanted anyway.”
And on Dec. 20, 2008, Heidi Elnora became the stage for that proposal. Jeff arranged for Heidi’s mom and a friend to keep her out of the shop while he decorated the rooms with tea lights and fl owers, turned on an iPod and awaited Heidi’s return.
“I picked this place to do it because it’s pretty symbolic for both of us,” he explains. “It symbolizes a change and an important part of Heidi’s life.”
“I spend nights and days working here by myself. But it makes me so happy,” Heidi adds. “It’s so close to my heart for him to come here, where he knows this is my passion.”
She expected a proposal soon, but was still caught off guard. “I don’t have makeup on,” Heidi recalls thinking. “My outfi t isn’t the right outfit.”
She made sure she was wearing the right outfi ts when their Oct. 17 wedding arrived. Before designing gowns for each stage of the celebration, Heidi modeled dresses from her shop to see what her groom liked best.
She never considered wearing only one. “That doesn’t tell the story of me,” she says. And even as the Bakers begin their lives together, Heidi is incorporating unused ideas into future collections and daydreaming about her next dress.
“I have our 10-year anniversary dress already picked out,” she says. “I’ll probably do two of them.”
