My new favorite lasting tool is a pair of round stainless steel chopsticks from my local Asian restaurant supply store. Here’s a similar set for sale by Target of all places:
I’ve enjoyed eating with these for years—mostly because they’re really simple to clean—but only recently caught on to how useful they are when pleating toes and heels during lasting. In particular:
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Since they taper toward the tips, they’re great for sliding into small pleats between tacks. This widens out the pleat from the inside, making it easier to flatten it down and divide with a tack through the middle.
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If you pull the chopstick out of a pleat, you can then use it as a pressing tool to divide and flatten the pleat down from the outside. Again, the tapered shape works well, flattening out more at the featherline than inward toward the middle of the heel or toe. I find it easier to do accurately than with the peen of a hammer, which is straight and stuck at the end of a big handle.
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Every once in a while I find myself thinking I should grab and snug the lining separately. A metal chopstick works nice as a blunt-nosed pick to separate the layers far enough to grasp just the lining with a pair of narrow lasting pliers.
I dig this! Wonder how long before Tandy is selling target chopstick “pleating tools” for $40 
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Does this have enough grip for you?? I had been using beading pliers for lasting the toe, because they are smaller and thinner than needle nose, but they don’t have the cross hatch/grippy surface and slip a lot for me.
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@citizen, welcome to the forum! Really great to have you here.
The metal chopsticks I’ve seen do have very faint serrations near the tips, but my post here was just about my experience using one metal chopstick alone as a poker or laying tool—basically a pointy but not too pointy stick. I haven’t tried using chopsticks to actually grip and pull upper leather under the featherline. I don’t suppose I will, because I don’t think that would be very effective.
Other experience has taught me that there is definitely a trade off between narrowness of lasting pliers jaws and grip. Narrower pliers can get in between pleats where wider pliers can’t, but nearly every time I tried to use them to put substantial tension into relatively heavy lather, the material tore out.
For what it’s worth, needle-nose pliers seem like the closest hardware store match to narrow lasting pliers to me. I’ve been meaning to try lasting a toe section with mine, just to try it. But I’m not sure I’d recommend that route, even if it works fairly well. At least here in the US, correctly shaped if not astoundingly beautiful lasting pliers are available on Amazon for $15. That’s half the cost of many framing hammers at my local hardware store.
For those doing lighter work—say, uppers in the 3-5 oz range—on a tight budget, that might be the only shoe-specific specialty tool I’d recommend. For those doing heavier work—say, 5oz and above—making do with hardware store pliers to start might do.
By the by, I recently found another readily available, stick-like tool: “laying tools” for fiber arts, sometimes also called “stilettos”. These are essentially pen-sized sticks of hardwood turned with blunt-pointed ends and round ends.
I got one very inexpensively at LACIS in Berkeley, California. Bu there are similar tools for sale all over the Web. The “slim stick” burnisher from WUTA is my current favorite:
Also good for laying turned edges and other fiddly closing tasks.