Depending on where you are (Europe or the United States) Velleman in Europe or Heathkit in the United States will sell you all kinds of electronics in kit form. Get some practice with that, try to figure out how what you have just built works (and in debugging you will learn a lot) and then later move on to your own designs or modifications of existing designs.
One issue I have with Velleman kits is that most of them that do something useful are built around some magic Velleman chip (ie. preprogrammed microcontroller) and examining the construction will not teach you much.
Hm, that doesn't help. I guess that's their way of trying to avoid knock-offs of their kits but it definitely takes the fun out of trying to figure out how things work if that part is pushed into some kind of black box.
But it is also a sign of the times, rather than having a bunch of logic the quickest way to get some project off the ground is to tie the i/o to a microcontroller and solve the remainder of the problem in software.
