CHENNAI: When Susan Noble visited The Little Flower Convent last year, she noticed the incredible softness of a woven cotton fabric that the students there were making. To her disbelief, she found that the cloth was sold as rags to wipe floors.

About 20 metres of the cloth and a year later, Ms. Noble is back in Chennai with a delegation from the University of Portsmouth, U.K., where she works, at the behest of the British Council (BC). Her B.A Fashion and Textiles Enterprise students and she used the woven cotton in class projects to produce a variety of products, the profits of which were sent to the Little Flower Convent. The products were exhibited at the Portsmouth City Museum and the potential for social enterprise as well as education in a new culture attracted the attention of the BC.

This led to the current workshop in the city for the students of Portsmouth, the National Institute of Fashion Technology and SCS Kothari Academy for Women. The idea of the programme is for the foreigners to interact with a few educational institutions in Chennai and swap ideas on techniques and creativity in the fashion and textile area.

The workshops will be made into a documentary on the meeting of two approaches of different cultures on the same subject, a task undertaken by media students from the Portsmouth University and the L.V. Prasad Film Institute. "Since globalisation is inevitable, we want to explore how to work collaboratively with a better understanding of cultures," said Ms. Noble. Indians are technically excellent in crafts, whereas they are more experimental in the U.K., she noted.

A rough cut of the documentary will be shown along with the products of the workshop at BC on Friday. Sally Pulvertaft, director of Enterprise, University of Portsmouth, said the most important aspect of the exercise is to "take a range of ideas back for students to consider." Kokila Kalyanasundaram, co-ordinator, Department of Fashion Design, said her students were teaching the two Portsmouth students traditional techniques such as ari work, mirror embroidery and the kasoothi stitch.

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