You can try http://www.qt-apps.org/. That's Qt only rather than KDE.
For KDE you can try installing it on your Ubuntu, use it for a while, pick one application that you like and look at it's source code. You can then get that from the KDE SVN repository, compile it yourself, change it, fix bugs, submit patches etc.
But remember that KDE is not Qt. KDE uses kdelibs which are another layer built on top of Qt. Maybe the cross-platform aspect also interests you: Qt works great on Linux, Mac and Windows while KDE works great on Linux and it's in the process of being ported to Mac and Windows. There is progress there (you can get KDE applications on Windows here) but they are by far not as polished as Qt is on Windows.
I guess you can say that if you aim to learn for getting a job using Qt or want strong cross-platform support then focusing on plain Qt is better, while if you aim to develop open-source applications using Qt KDE could be the better choice.