One thing that I have recommended to people who want to do something like this but without the fuss is to check out the schematic capture feature of the Altera Quartus II Design software, there is a free web version of it available and there are very cheap experimenters boards like the Terasic DE0 which goes for around $50. You can draw the schematics using TTL or equivalent and it will produce the equivalent HDL and compile it and you can run it on a real FPGA, it is just like doing it with TTL, but just not as much soldering or wire wrapping involved :)