Lyla Lillis has been hooked on pottery since she took a pottery class in 1999.

Later that same year, her husband surprised her with a potter’s wheel and a kiln to further explore her hobby.

“He created a monster,” Lillis said with a laugh.

In October, Lillis is one of the two featured artists at Garry Oak Gallery, in which she shows and sells her pottery, ranging from jewelry to angels to functional pieces that can be used for eating.

“It’s almost like, if I don’t have the opportunity to create something, I just feel stifled in all other aspects of my life,” Lillis said.

“I just have to make something, or it just doesn’t work for me.”

Born and raised on Fidalgo Island, Lillis has lived in the area all her life. Now, she lives in Oak Harbor with her husband of 44 years, Archie Lillis.

A former assistant teacher for the school district and a florist at the Navy Exchange, her artwork was always a hobby.

Now it takes a back seat several times a year to other hobbies like working on her 1955 Chevy, which she calls a symptom of “empty nest syndrome.”

These days, she only creates pottery six months out of the year.

A self-described snow bird, Lillis and her husband spend their winters in Yuma, Ariz., where she uses another medium in her repertoire.

“I paint down south,” Lillis said, “and I do the pottery up north.”

Art has been something she’s loved since she was a young child, and she has expressed that love in many different ways throughout the course of her life, using anything there was to make something out of — from sandboxes all the way to crocheting, she said.

She said her first experience with pottery was playing in the mud as a kid.

After she started making pottery on a regular basis, she became curious about the natural resources available on Whidbey Island.

“I was thinking of years and years ago, people had to live here, and they had to eat out of something,” she said. “All over the world, there’s clay, pretty much. I thought, well, I’ll just see about this clay we’ve got here, and I was very surprised to see that the clay we have on the island can be made into functional pottery.”

She doesn’t use the natural, local clay exclusively, but said that her jewelry pieces mostly come from the local clay.

Her jewelry is popular, as are her abstract angel sculptures, she said, but one of the most popular types of work she sells are tall cylinders with hand-crafted people appearing as if they’re peeking out from behind the clay.

She said children especially like them because they find it amusing when they can see the faces, hands and toes sticking out.

“I think nature mostly (inspires me),” Lillis said. “The flow of the ocean, the lay of the land.

“For pottery, the feel of the clay.”

Sharing art, for her, is important as well.

“I think it’s just a luxury; it’s a joy,” she said. “It seems to make people happy, and that’s a good thing.”

In fact, she said it’s a blessing.

Every time she fires something in her kiln, she said she asks God for a blessing, both on the pottery and for anyone who touches her pottery.

“Not buys the pottery, but touches the pottery, because not everybody can afford pottery,” Lillis said. “But I just ask God to give a blessing to everybody who touches the pottery.

“And thank him for the ability to do this because I would not have this ability otherwise.”