When they appear, the king asks how they came to have such deformities, and the three explain that they come from their years of spinning-the foot from treading, the lip from licking, and the thumb from twisting thread. The king forbids his beautiful daughter-in-law to spin again. Variant: Hateful Flax Spinning A king orders his queen and daughters to spin all the time. One day, he gives them a great box of flax to spin, to his daughters' distress. The queen invites three hideous old maids to come to the castle and spin. The king sees them and asks the cause of their deformities. Their answer: from spinning. The king forbids his wife and daughters to spin again. Italian variants The Seven Little Pork Rinds A girl eats seven pieces of bacon, leaving none for her mother. While the mother beats her for her gluttony, a passing merchant asks the reason, and the woman replies that her daughter is ruining her health by working too hard. The merchant decides on the spot to marry this industrious girl. The now-married merchant goes on a journey, leaving his wife the spinning. Making an effort to spin, she flicks a passersby with water; some passing fairies are so amused by this that they offer to do the spinning for her. Despite their aid, the merchant's wife claims that the spinning has made her ill, and the merchant decides not to require her to spin any more, as her mother must have been right about her overworking. And Seven! In this version, as in the one just described, the part of the king is taken by a merchant; similarly, the mother berates her daughter for "seven" – meaning seven bowls of soup that the girl has eaten – but the mother pretends that they are spindles of hemp that the girl has spun. The women helpers in this version – who also are deformed from their years of spinning – instruct the girl to invite them to her wedding by calling their names. If she does not do so, they warn her, she will be worse off than she would have been had they not spun for her. She forgets the names and puts off the wedding while she tries to recall them. The merchant sees the three women cavorting in the forest and hears them call out their names, similar to the scene