Woman stumbles upon touching note inside thrift-store sweater

It’s not uncommon for thrifters and antique hunters to find hidden gems—cryptic notes or sentimental tokens—that capture deep emotions. Izabela, known on TikTok as @grandmasnosejob, encountered exactly that: a touching message stitched inside a sweater at her local thrift spot, leaving her with a big ol’ case of the warm fuzzies.

Representative photo by Dom J | Pexels

Izabela’s TikTok video showed a beige jute sweater with big coconut buttons. She wondered in an overlay, “Which one of you dropped this off at the thrift store?” The clip blew up, racking up 8.8 million views, 1.8 million likes, and over 6,000 comments. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed the sweater, priced at $10.49, had a sewn-in label reading, “Made with grandma with love.” A tiny frog doodle sat alongside the text, moving Izabela to tears. Her caption: “Made by grandma? With love?” followed by crying emojis.

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The moving find stirred a big reaction across TikTok. Some commenters felt it was downright heartbreaking for anyone to toss a homemade sweater brimming with love. One user, @pippalovesp.nk@pippalovesp.nk, wrote, “If I saw that I’m gonna buy ‘cause if they don’t want I want it.”

Image Source: TikTok | @raahosh

Image Source: TikTok | @llucylou

Plenty of folks focused on the sweeter side of this discovery, sharing their own touching stories. One user, @guro_man_manga, remarked, “I found a sweater with a ‘from mom’ label in it.” Another, @y3llowbricks, recalled losing cherished dolls made with her grandma: “The box even had my name on it…I cry at night thinking about it. I would literally do anything to get it back.”

Image Source: TikTok | @austenc.15

On the flip side, a handful of skeptics believed the tag could be a manufactured brand design rather than a heartfelt grandma note. “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,” wrote user @heyfelicia_.

Representative pgoto by Sam Lion | Pexels

Of course, this isn’t the first time someone’s stumbled upon a soulful message in thrifted clothing. Vintage markets overflow with hidden love letters or cryptic scrawls. One famous example is the ‘Silk Dress Cryptogram’—a message tucked into a silk dress back in 1888, eventually discovered by a thrift shopper. Codebreakers around the globe tried to unravel it until Wayne Chan, a researcher at the University of Manitoba, cracked the code a decade later.

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Speaking to CNN, Chan revealed that he pored over 170 code books to no avail: “I worked on it for a few months, but didn’t get anywhere… I set it aside and didn’t look at it again.” Eventually, he published an academic paper in August 2022 explaining it was a telegraph code: “Since telegraph companies charged by the number of words in a telegram, codes to compress a message… became popular,” he wrote.

If you want more lifestyle content, you can follow Izabela on TikTok.