Every once in a while, people shopping at places like thrift shops and antique bazaars chance upon unique souvenirs, secret notes, or heartfelt messages from strangers. These mementos encapsulate a plethora of emotions. Something similar happened with Izabela, who goes as @grandmasnosejob on TikTok. She was shopping when she found a heartbreaking tag inside a sweater in one of the alleys in a thrift store and her heart was filled with love.
Izabela posted a video showcasing a beige jute sweater featuring large golden-brown coconut buttons hanging on a clothesstand. She wrote in the overlay, “Which one of you dropped this off at the thrift store?” The video became viral with a whopping 8.8 million views, 1.8 million likes, and more than 6,000 comments. In the short clip, the viewers noticed that the sweater came with a price tag that read $10.49. A tag was sewn into the insides of the sweater and the label on it read, “Made with grandma with love.” Besides the note, there was a cute frog doodle printed on the tag. The tag made Izabella teary-eyed, and she posted in the caption, “Made by grandma? With love?” She accompanied her caption with several crying emojis.
The heartwarming incident left people on TikTok awestruck. However, there were some who had mixed opinions about the sweater. Many of them said that it was unjust, cruel, and heartless for someone to have thrown away this sweater at a thrift shop, something that was made with utter love. @pippalovesp.nk commented, “If I saw that I’m gonna buy ‘cause if they don’t want I want it.”
Others just expressed how beautiful this entire scenario was, and shared their own similar experiences. @guro_man_manga, for example, said, “I found a sweater with a ‘from mom’ label in it.” @y3llowbricks recalled how his grandma had given her a craft set with which they made some dolls, but unfortunately, the dolls had to be donated to charity for some reason. “The box even had my name on it…I cry at night thinking about it. I would literally do anything to get it back,” she wrote.
At the same time, several people opined that the tag was just a logo of some brand and not an actual grandma’s message. “You can buy these tags on the internet! Maybe it’s not actually made by someone’s grandma and they just wanted us to be sad,” said @heyfelicia_.
It is not the first time when someone has discovered a thoughtful note inside thrift clothing. From vintage jewelry boxes etched with mysterious sobriquets to antique chests hiding cryptic notes, people have been finding things like these for years. The infamous ‘Silk Dress Cryptogram’ is a testament to this. A secret note was hidden in a silk dress by a woman in 1888. The note was found years later by a shopper at a thrift store and after that, codebreakers from around the world were trying to decipher it. Wayne Chan, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, finally cracked the mysterious code a decade later.
He told CNN that initially he looked at 170 code books and none of them matched the message. “I worked on it for a few months, but didn’t get anywhere with it. I set it aside and didn’t look at it again.” Chan said. In August 2022, Chan published an academic paper explaining the puzzle. He started by saying that it was a telegraph code, “Since telegraph companies charged by the number of words in a telegram, codes to compress a message to reduce the number of words became popular,” he wrote.
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This article originally appeared last year.
