Read my tutorial
For a full description of my embedded design project, read my tutorial, which you will find on my website. Also please note that this is an interactive experience – I welcome your comments, suggestions, and questions, which you can post on my site.
Lessons learned
Yes, it is possible to learn how to design an embedded system using an FPGA. The biggest problem is finding the documentation and understanding the whole design flow. Hopefully my tutorial will help you in that respect. If you have some hardware and software experience it will be easier, but even for a newbie it is doable.