Bride-to-Be Tara Lipinski Gave Us the Scoop on Every Detail of Her Engagement Party

“She just knows everything,” Lipinski says of her engagement party planner, Mindy Weiss. “I just feel really lucky to have met her and to have her guiding me through this process because I know it can be a bit stressful. There were a lot of little special things that I just didn’t think of, like the really cute napkins with ‘TNT.’ When you walked into the room, all those little details made such a big difference.”

“I had the idea to bring in CoolHaus because I love their ice cream sandwiches so much,” she says. “I was expecting one or two flavors and they had at least five different ones. Obviously chocolate is my go-to, but they had a lot of options. To have that as a midnight snack was pretty awesome."

“It had a removable skirt,” Lipinski tells InStyle about her white Mark Zunino stunner. “When I went to Mark, I said I didn’t know if I wanted a really tight dress or more of a fit and flare dress. He said ‘We’ll do both.’ It was really fun to start the night in the full dress and then be able to take it off, dance, and have a good time. It was just such a fun process having it custom made for you. It fits like a glove and obviously I love it."

“I wanted a very clean look,” she explains. “We had the party at the top of Mr. C Hotel and it has all these beautiful windows, so I just wanted a very fresh, clean look. We went with all white and then because we thought we could add a fun accent color, we added gold."

When Lipinski’s fiance proposed to her over the holidays, he took over a window at the Plaza where a commissioned painting of the two of them was on display. The painting featured Kapostasy proposing to Lipinski in front of her house. “We came up with the idea of putting the painting on the invitation,” she says. “We both looked at each other and knew that was exactly what we wanted. We went on the Wedding Paper Divas site and there’s just so many options and everything was so beautiful. I was so overwhelmed and wanted them all! They made the invitation look just like a painting. It was really perfect."

Since the engaged duo met at the Emmy Awards (where Kapostasy won multiple Emmys for producing Fox Sports) and Lipinski won the gold medal at the 1998 winter Olympic games, they opted for “fake Emmys and medals,” according to her. She says, “Everyone loved the photo booth. It was one of those GIF ones and the background image changed, so you could pretend you were presenting at the Emmys or they had a skating one where you were in an ice arena and flowers fell in the background. Everyone got a kick out of that."

“The party was long so it was nice to mix it up and have all types of music,” Lipinski says, pictured above with Johnny Weir. "We put some oldies in there for my mom and dad. Our friends love to have a good time and at the end of the night, Todd and two other people split their pants. So after that happened, I was like ‘Okay, it was a good party then.’"