Steve Sergev stood at his lathe, woodchips spraying around him as he edged the onetime block of walnut closer toward the recognizable curvature of a bowl. As he took more and more chunks off his material, a musty exposed wood scent added itself to the odor of crisp, dried lumber that already permeated his shop.

Soon the not-quite-raw-material, not-quite-functional-object he was shaping in his hands would join hundreds of other wood chunks and half-finished, drying bowls littered and stacked in the shop next to his house just outside Sammamish.

Letting the lathe slow, the 68-year-old examined his work. Getting close.

“It’s just satisfying to take a lump of wood and make something useful out of it,” Sergev said later that day while sitting with his wife of 40 years, Cory, at their dining room table. “It’s fun to discover the grain inside.”

A retired Boeing engineer, Sergev said he does not consider himself an artist. But Cory, an artist herself, vigorously disagrees. If you ask her, she’ll launch into an examination of Sergev’s use of form, shape and color.

“[Those are] all the things that artists use,” she said.

She also noted her husband’s “infinite amount of patience” for seeing a piece to its end.

It could take hours or days to shape a piece, Sergev said. The entirety of the process, from sourcing the wood to creating a finished product, can take months. When he gets freshly cut wood, it needs to air out. After roughly shaping the piece using the lathe, he sets it aside again to dry out. Roughly shaping the wood helps remove the “waste wood” and accelerates the drying process.

“As the wood dries, it changes shape — generally what was round becomes oval and a rim that was flat can develop large ups and downs,” he said. “The game is to leave enough wood in the thick wall so when it dries and becomes oval that a circle can still be drawn within the inner and outer walls.”

He takes care to work with the grain of the wood, both to capture the natural beauty of the material and avoid splits or cracks. But mistakes happen.

“Sometimes you get fancy firewood,” he said, pointing out some of the abandoned creations in his shop.

Sergev’s love of woodwork developed before he was 10 years old. He built wooden forts from materials he scrounged from nearby homes under construction in his north Seattle neighborhood.

In middle school he convinced his father, an engineer, to build a boat using mostly hand tools. They made curved cuts on the plywood by “coercing” the movements of a typically straight-cutting handsaw, Sergev said.

Around the same time, Sergev started experimenting using a wood lathe to make bowls with “relatively crude techniques,” he said. His uncle gave him a simple wood lathe suitable for spindle turning — not so much for bowl making.

Later, in a metal casting course at the University of Washington gunning for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Sergev made a device to hold a bowl, upgrading the lathe his uncle had given him.

During graduate school at UW, he converted his parents’ laundry room into a woodshop.

“My mother complained about the amount of dust I produced,” he said, “so dad and I commissioned a one-man sheet metal shop to build a simple dust collector.”

After graduating with a master’s degree in ocean engineering, he returned home.

Committing himself to searching for at least one job a month, Sergev passed the time creating numerous bowls and cutting boards he would enter in Seattle’s University District Street Fair in 1972.

“I was happy to sell out in the two days,” he said. “Then I made a mistake of taking orders for the bowls, and then suddenly the fun was out of it.”

But soon — between his early career, marriage and building a family — Sergev had little time for woodturning.

Working for the U.S. Navy as a civilian engineer, Sergev began in Bremerton overhauling nuclear submarines. He was later transferred to California, where he found the work far more enjoyable. And while he could “mow the grass in shorts on Christmas,” after several years, he and his wife decided to move back to the Pacific Northwest to raise their two children.

Sergev took a position at Honeywell in Seattle.

After that he was hired on with the Boeing Company. Early in his career there, he worked on the concept for the High Speed Civil Transport, a supersonic passenger plane. He created mathematical models used to size the plane’s framework.

After that he moved to a different Boeing team, focusing on special-purpose computer programs used in the preliminary design of airplanes to estimate the weights of their various systems.

About midway through his 25-year career at Boeing, a coworker introduced Sergev to the Seattle chapter of the American Association of Woodturners.

“I was never much on joining stuff but I thought, ‘aw, what the heck,'” he said.

Getting back into the hobby, Sergev has been working to refine his techniques. Currently he’s working with dyes that “accentuate the beautiful grain,” he said.

“I use an airbrush to apply the dye in a controlled manner and just judge by eye when to stop or to add another color,” he said.

Apart from his bowls, Sergev’s made things like snowmen, Christmas trees, cutting boards, a toy duck, a baby’s crib, a children’s wagon and a changing table. He mostly uses gifted wood for his creations and never cuts a tree down for the purpose of woodturning.

He entered some of his work — mostly bowls — in to the Sammamish Arts Fair last year.

“There are a lot of bowls out there in their trees just waiting to be discovered,” he said.