“Then the process starts.” It’s fleshed, salted, rehydrated, shaved (twice), tanned, oiled, dried, tumbled, brushed, tumbled again, brushed again, inspected, sized, and graded. “When we receive a buffalo hide, it is immediately inspected for any imperfections,” Barb says. What makes his hides the best? He only works with ones in their prime, and each hide is treated individually. But tanning buffalo hair-on-hides remains Merlin’s specialty. Today Merlin’s Hide Out offers accessories for human and home - from rugs and blankets to jackets and handbags - handcrafted from fox, coyote, and beaver pelts. The couple opened up their first commercial tannery, “and within three months, we were turning away work,” Barb says. So Merlin made leatherwork a full-time gig. In 2005, after Merlin lost his brother, he and Barb agreed that life is too short not to follow your passion. “For his birthday I gave him a sign, because I could never find him, that said Merlin’s Hide Out, meaning that’s where he always was.” The name stuck, and the business was born. “And that was the first tannery,” Barb says. With buffalo instantly becoming Merlin’s hide of choice, the following year the couple built a small log shed as his studio. “I put my foot down and said not in the spare bedroom!” The following winter a good friend asked Merlin if he would tan a buffalo hide. “As it often happens,” Barb says, “a couple beaver hides turned into many.” Next came coyotes and fox, but it wasn’t until a year later that his tanning business started to take form. Merlin was instantly hooked on his newfound craft. “We set up our spare bedroom with a tarp and some little Rubbermaid posts, and he tanned the beaver and made the gators,” Barb says. “Unlike what I would call a normal person who would just get on the Internet and buy a new pair, he decided he would trap the beaver and tan them himself.” And he did. “He’d had a pair of beaver gators - those are leggings made from beaver hide - that had worn out, and he wanted a new pair,” recalls Merlin’s wife, Barb. But it wasn’t until adulthood, during a cold Wyoming winter in 1997, that Merlin tried his hand at tanning. In his early youth, he also took up sewing, in order to repurpose the leftover hides from his kills. Growing up on a ranch in Thermopolis, Wyoming, he’s been at it his whole life. Merlin Heinze, head craftsman and namesake of Merlin’s Hide Out, has always loved hunting. An expert in buffalo hides, this small town Wyoming leather artist has made a big name for himself around the world - even in Hollywood.
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