Then, if I understand correctly, you traced body, head, ears, tails, etc all separately and fused them to the quilt. Correct?

I did the bears as a head,two separate ears, an arm, a paw, a tail and a body(and a separate rump on 1) and two pieces for each eye.
for the fish there was a main body, a tail, a head, a lower jaw, an eye(I stitched the black centre for their eyes) a dorsal fin and 1 or two lower fins as per the pattern.
hope that helps.