She spent $6 on Picasso's plates at a thrift store and sold them for thousands

What seemed like an ordinary trip to the thrift store turned into an unexpected windfall for one New Yorker when she stumbled onto plates made by Pablo Picasso being sold for $1.99 each.

In a video posted on social media, Nancy Cavaliere said she went to the thrift store after work just like any other day and perused the china aisle when she made the unexpected find.

“I go back when they put out new stuff, and I see these,” Cavaliere says, showing a photo of four plates, depicting abstract black and white faces with orange and green accents. The back of the plates were stamped with Picasso’s name. They were the renowned artist’s “visage noir” plates, part of a collection he painted in the 1940s.

Cavaliere told Newsweek she went back to work and started searched the web for the plate’s origins. The search all but confirmed her suspicions. She said she then called up experts to have the plates authenticated.

What cost Cavaliere $6 in total turned out to be valued at $3,000 to $5,000 — or at least that’s what the experts told her. When they went under the hammer, the three plates Cavaliere sold went for $12,000, $13,000, and even $16,000, respectively.

“I was watching the auction from the office screaming, crying, throwing up,” she said, calling the experience “absolutely bananas.”

Cavaliere says in her video she saved one of the ceramic works for her daughter in a safety deposit box. The underside of the plates she found are stamped “Edition Picasso” and Madoura Plein Feu engraving, indicating they were made at the Madoura pottery studio in southern France, where all Picasso ceramics were produced.

The one Cavaliere saved for her daughter is also signed by Picasso, she said.

Cavaliere told Newsweek she invested the money she earned and continues to go thrifting.

Picasso designed 3,500 unique pieces of ceramic art between 1947 and 1971, and 633 collections, with pieces in each series numbering from one unique piece to several hundred. Artists at his Maduro studio would recreate his works from prototypes, known as “authentic replicas,” which numbered close to 120,000.