It's common, it's cheap and there's probably a long roll of it in your kitchen. Aluminium foil. Thin and conductive, it's been used for various electronic applications.
50 or 60 years ago, when metal chassis were both desirable and expensive, those building valve (tube) projects, especially if using battery valves, sometimes formed chassis from wooden packing crates with foil glued on.
Foils much wider than wire can be useful. A large piece could be taped to a window to form wideband dipoles for VHF or UHF amateur bands. These can either be horizontally or vertically polarised.
Homebrew transmitters sometimes require a shielded case or shielding between stages to remove feedback. Foil stuck onto plastic or cardboard could form lightweight boxes or partitions.
Foil can form a ground plane for UHF and microwave vertical antenna projects.
Here is a project describing an aluminium foil based fractal antenna.
Finally, my video below shows foil being used as a variable capacitor. That could be handy for a crystal set project.
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