Northwesterners find assorted ways to honor Stars and Stripes

Go looking for the American flag and you only might find one as close your neighbor's front porch, or maybe even your own.

"Nowhere on Earth do citizens fly their national flags, as Americans do, everywhere they live and everywhere they go," explains Marc Leepson, who in 2005 wrote "Flag: An American Biography."

For this Fourth of July we went looking for the flag, and talked to people about their feelings for this symbolic piece of cloth, or, in some cases, of plastic or even tin cans.

You might think that an American flag made out of Coca-Cola cans or beer-bottle caps might seem, well, a little disrespectful.

But then you take a good look at the artwork that Ross Palmer Beecher, above, produces out of her Wallingford home, and that tin flag in all its flashiness is mesmerizing.

Beecher, 53, combines her New England folk-art background with Mexican folk art using tin that she saw in the West Coast. The result has been at least 50 metal flags, some of which have ended at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.

Is it disrespectful to make flags out of tin? No way, said Beecher, who also hangs a flag on her front door.

Beecher said it takes a month to make a flag, what with all the snipping and putting together of pieces. She's sold 25 of the metal flags, she said, and can fetch "a few thousand dollars."

Ash Grove Cement | Brightly lit, one of most visible flags in the city

Ashley Hamblet, Stephanie Jackson | 'On behalf of ... a grateful nation'

Randal Nelson | 'Never make fun of or be disrespectful' to the flag

Joseph Bell | Raising a giant flag

Chris Wallick | 'Easy Rider'