Originally Posted by Toni C

The backside being so busy as you say won't really show allot of quilting so going for the front sounds good to me. I made a Christmas quilt for my GD, with a horse in a stable with a wreath on the door. I stuffed and outlined the head halter eyes nose et and outlined different aspects of it. It turned out great. Your will also!

Originally Posted by Prism99

Regarding the extra batting under the whales, yes, this is called trapunto. You would need to quilt some of the details in the whale to keep the extra batting in place. Actually, instead of spray basting the extra batting to the top, you could use a soft fusible such as MistyFuse to fuse it to the top.

Edit: There is a method for adding trapunto where you add a layer of batting underneath the shape and use water-dissolving thread to sew around the outline from the top. Then you turn the quilt over and, being ***very*** careful, trim the batting to just outside of the sewn outline. That way you can be sure to catch all of the whale outline in the quilting, as you will be able to see where the water-dissolvable thread is. However, this is a lot more work than the other method and you do risk accidentally cutting a hole in your panel.