The sewing table will accept weapons & shields from "Epic Knights: Shields, Armor and Weapons" as needles:

Just one example. Many other items in that mod also do this.

You should report this to that mod, it appears to be their fault:

I use the result of the canPerformAction method to decide when something is the right tool. This mod seems to always return true from that method, meaning that so far as the forge tool system cares, all their mods can be used to do the "sewingkit_sew" action.
They need to only return true for the tool actions they actually implement, which should NOT include the needle sew action if it's not a needle.

I submitted the issue to Magistu; hopefully he'll clear the open function; I think I also saw this issue in 1.16.5; with the "sewing_needle" function (took me a while to figure out why my datapack was broken), so I'm not sure.
Kudos for the super-fast reply!