Chocolate coins are not just for eating

Giving chocolate coins at Christmas is a very old tradition - and they lend themselves so well to being used as advent calendar- or stocking fillers.

The gleaming yellow gold of these hefty coins suggests wealth and good fortune, which is where the tradition of giving gold coins for Christmas, St Nicholas, Hanukkah and New Year's comes from.

The foil is usually made of aluminium and can be recycled if you scrunch it up into a bigger piece of foil together with other scraps like mince-pie cases or larger pieces of aluminium foil. But there is also a beautiful craft you can do with them, which is to rub the foil smooth, emboss patterns into it and then cut them into shapes.

Here are some ideas for how you can use embossed gold foil decorations:

• Gift tags: emboss a mirror image of the initial of the gift recipient onto the foil and stick it to a gift with adhesive putty.

• Garlands: String little gold foil shapes like stars, hearts, or other symbols of winter andChristmas onto some gold thread and wrap it around your tree, hang it from your mantlepiece, shelf or into a window.

• Bells: You can cut or fold the gold discs in half and wrap them around the tip of a pencil to create small bell shapes. These make sweet ornaments for the tree.

• Snippet garlands (using all the left over snippets you have cut out of the discs to create stars)

• Wall hangings: Tape or glue the shapes onto a mountboard or card and frame it for a festive wall decoration. I have an antique printer drawer on my dining room wall that is a perfect home for these decorations, as they fit neatly into the small compartments and look great against the dark wood.

• Table decoration: Scatter the shapes between your candles and flower vases on your Christmas dinner table.

As I was smoothing out the golden foil discs, I couldn’t help but wonder how they are made, and here’s a very short YouTube video that shows the process.

Embossing basics

Metal embossing is of course a skilful craft that, if fully dedicated to it, you can buy all kinds of specialist tools for, like embossing pens, mats and rollers and sheets of different metals with varying thicknesses. But if you want to practise it as a one-off activity with chocolate coin foil, there are some ‘kitchen drawer’ alternatives to get your started.

If you don’t want to invest in an embossing pen, you could use a skewer, cocktail stick, an old biro that has run out of ink, a very hard pencil that won’t leave marks on the foil, a knitting needle and cotton buds for larger areas of embossing.

Put a cutting mat, a piece of felt or a paper pad underneath the foil when you emboss it. You need the surface you are working on to have a little bit of ‘give’ for the embossing tool to be able to make an imprint The important thing to remember is that if, for example, you are working on a marble kitchen worktop, the imprint you would get would be too faint; a piece of felt will give you a deeper imprint than a paper pad. And if you are working on a wooden table, you may end up making an imprint into the tabletop itself if you don’t use a mat to protect it.

Remember that the ‘right’ side of your work is the flip side of the foil, so when you write letters, you need to emboss their mirror image. Also consider this when you have foil that is silver on one side and gold on the other.

You can use printed templates if you don’t feel confident in your hand drawing skills, or buy a relief template from a craft store, though I think hand embossing is more creative and will add a more personal touch.

Try tomato puree tubes

There is another 'upcycling' method to create these ornaments similar to this which uses empty tubes of tomato puree - the inside of which is gold. This is a bit harder to work with because the metal is thicker, and one side of the metal is printed, so you would either only use this for a wall hanging where only one side is visible, or you could glue two identical pieces together - a slightly more elaborate process. But it’s nice that it’s a free material that is larger than the chocolate coin wrappers.